I haven’t written about the Benghazi affair before. I’m not in a position to judge whether the State Department or military could have intervened in time to save Ambassador Stevens, or why the consulate wasn’t reinforced, etc. I’m sure the disaster could have been prevented, and someone is responsible for it. But I’m not the one to explain how and who.
What I am competent to discuss is the politics of the decision to present the attack as something that it was not, and that the relevant people knew at the time it was not.
Some of President Obama’s opponents have been saying that it was all about the election. Obama’s claim was that he had more or less ended the terrorist threat — after all, he killed bin Laden! So the truth that an American ambassador was murdered on the anniversary of 9/11 by al-Qaeda linked terrorists would not be helpful. Therefore, the story that the attack grew out of a spontaneous demonstration over an anti-Islam video was pushed instead.
This is true as far as it goes. But it doesn’t go far enough. The fact is that the video story was part of a theme that has run through Obama’s presidency from the beginning. This is the idea that the policy of the United States toward the anti-Western jihad should have two dimensions: we will kill overt anti-American terrorists, while at the same time try to placate the Muslim world through diplomacy and propaganda.
Every effort is made to relate positively to Muslims here and abroad. Aid programs are established to Muslim countries. NASA administrators are asked to reach out to the Muslim world. Less benignly, ‘Islamophobia’ is presented as a more dangerous phenomenon than domestic jihad, the administration embraces the Palestinian cause, supports Islamists in Egypt, falls in love with the Islamist PM of Turkey, etc.
This policy, which started immediately before Obama’s inauguration when he pressured Israel to withdraw from Gaza, found full expression in his Cairo speech of June 4, 2009. Although I was initially shocked by his obscene equation of the Holocaust with the way the “Palestinian people … have suffered in pursuit of a homeland,” the most alarming thing about the speech taken as a whole is its obeisance to the Arab and Muslim historical narrative, the story that is told to justify aggression against the US and the West (and Israel is only a small part of this).
For example, he said,
The relationship between Islam and the West includes centuries of co-existence and cooperation, but also conflict and religious wars. More recently, tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim-majority countries were too often treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations. Moreover, the sweeping change brought by modernity and globalization led many Muslims to view the West as hostile to the traditions of Islam.
In other words, it’s all our fault. Never mind the cultural and political backwardness that made Muslim nations hellholes for all but a tiny privileged minority, never mind the cynical behavior of kleptocratic Muslim leaders who sold themselves to whomever would supply the most weapons for them to use in their wars and intrigues against each other and Israel — their problems are all because of those Western colonialists!
Compare them to Israel, which freed itself from British domination to become the most successful nation in the Middle East, or Vietnam, or many other formerly colonized peoples. And keep in mind that many Arab countries, like Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq, went rapidly from Ottoman domination to independence, suffering little, if at all, from Western exploitation.
Obama’s approach extended to the way we respond to ideologically-motivated terrorism in the US. The administration seems to have taken the true statement “not all Muslims support terrorism” and quite invalidly inferred from it that “Islam can never be the motive for terrorism.” So Major Nidal Hassan’s mass murder at Ft. Hood is explained as workplace violence, other terrorists are defined as mentally disturbed, the Department of Homeland Security issues a directive that such words as ‘jihad’ and ‘Muslim’ cannot be used in connection with terrorism, and the NYPD is criticized for carrying out surveillance of mosques.
In the view of the Obama administration, the enemy is not an ideology. It is only specific organizations (whose motives are not discussed) that attack us.
Any disagreement with this position — anyone who suggests that there is a dangerous ideology of political Islam out there which often finds violent expression in terrorist acts — is stigmatized as an Islamophobe, a kind of racist, a designation which places the person so vilified outside the pale of discourse, and justifies denying him or her the right to speak publicly.
And so we come back to Benghazi. What better explanation could be given for the disaster than an Islamophobic video? Not only does the randomness of the outburst excuse everyone involved for the failure — who could have known this would happen? — and not only does it hide the fact that even the acknowledged war against al-Qaeda hasn’t been going as well as they would like us to think, it casts blame precisely on those ‘intolerant’ opponents of the administration’s policy of trying to placate the Muslim world!
Thus the schmuck who made the video is imprisoned for a year for a parole violation, after Hillary Clinton tells the parent of one of the US personnel murdered in the attack that she would see to it that the filmmaker was arrested and prosecuted.
The dual policy — killing overt terrorists while expressing love and respect for Islam — is both unfortunate for our real allies, like Israel, which sees itself pressured into concessions to the PLO or Hamas as a way to show that Obama cares about Palestinian Muslims, as well as a failure.
The reason for the failure is a misunderstanding of the messages we send as they are received in Arab and Muslim cultures. The message of caring and respect that we are trying to send is perceived as weakness. Muslims understand that non-Muslims can either fight or submit to Islam — it’s not possible to admire Islam while at the same time refusing to submit. So Obama’s gestures are either ignored or indicate that he is not strong enough to fight.
At the same time, the drone strikes and the war in Afghanistan kill Muslims, and it is the duty of Muslims to avenge these killings. The fact that the perpetrators are non-Muslims makes them obscene in these cultures, the reversal of the natural order.
In the meantime, the morale of our police forces on the home front is weakened, the tools necessary to discover and prevent jihadist terrorism are taken out of their hands, and aggressive Islamic ideologues in our mosques and college campuses are encouraged.
A better policy would be to stop pretending to admire the people who hate us. We should say to the Muslim world, “look, we have a system that’s different from yours, we think it’s better, and we intend to defend it. Anyone who hurts us or our allies will get it back ten times over.” We don’t need to ‘declare war on Islam’ to do that, as apologists for the present policy claim.
Our leaders have become so used to lying, that they haven’t considered simply being honest and standing up for what we believe.
Technorati Tags: Islam, Benghazi, Obama administration
Commenting on your closing sentence, the core problem is that our current non-leadership simply does not believe what “we” – i.e., the bulk of the American body politic – believe.
And even many of the rank and file citizenry have become so unsure as to what this country stands for, thanks to our crappy educational system and the dry rot that has increasingly undermined our political culture since Vietnam, that too many cannot see Obama & Co. for what they really are in objective terms: traitors.
So, Obama & Co. can’t stand for beliefs or values that they do not have. To them, as you describe at length, America is the problem, and it is America that must be made safe for the world by weakening her and withdrawing from the world stage, so as to reassure everyone else that we “mean no harm”. And in the meantime, we deserve everything we get from them for our “past sins”.
Their lies are not simply a cover for cowardice, though at some level this is in play, in a highly rationalized form that passes for enlightened thought. They are first and foremost a cover for the fact that they have to pretend that they are defending America, when in fact they are not. In essense, this is institutionalized treason.
To my knowledge, this dynamic has never happened to any other great power in history. This is worse than simple decadence; this is active identification with the narratives and goals of our enemies, and going on to enable our enemies from the levers of power here.
Anyone remember Gus Hall? He was the perennial candidate for the American Communist Party for many years. Try to imagine if at the height of the Cold War…he was elected president.
Or, students of history here might recall that some prominent Americans during the 1930s were open sympathizers of the Nazis. People such as Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and Joe Kennedy. Imagine if in say, 1936, one of them had been elected president.
That is the situation we are now in with Obama.
It is scary as hell. Fortunately, we are a big country and not so easy to undermine in a prompt and comprehensive way. Our election may have been rigged – I’m sure it was – but those responsible forgot to install a rubber stamp legislature. And, there are other interests with at least some power and influence in the country who are not simply going to sit idly by and let this happen.
For all his faults, I also think Netanyahu may be able to do his part to resist America’s foreign policy decline by himself showing resolve, as he has no choice at the present time. The recent strikes in Syria were indicative of this. If a major war breaks out, either the U.S. supports Israel, or lacking such support, if Israel has ‘nothing to lose’, the gloves are off and Israel goes all out…something Obama probably doesn’t want to see happen.
44 months to go…
The simple political reasoning in the article is of course in keeping with the political desires to see this Benghazi as just a series of unfortunate events. Requisite with the unfortunate events we still seem to have however a “Maniacal desire” by this administration to make it all go away. Maniacal is the best word when it comes to what has been exposed in congressional questioning this past week. Maniacal also best explains the gagging, intimidation. blocking over 31 employees from speaking to Legal congress inquiry?
It is clear the Obama Government does not want truth to come out. , and certainly not in a venue that cold pursue criminal charges against partied involved.
Around the beltway this past week off the record commentary has been going for the jugular. In particular suggesting that the Benghazi affair was a hostage taking gone bad in a State Department scheme to have Ambassador Steven taken hostage by Egyptian Al Qaeda Why? To create a bargaining chip to release “The Blind Shiekh” serving time for the fist and unsuccessful bombing of the trade towers. Release of the Shiekh was a determination of Egyptian President Morsi since before he was elected.
Creating and controlling the faux hostage situation would have allowed a prisoner exchange, beneficial vote getting stunt for Obama before the 2012 election not to mentioned a bolstering of Morsi image in Egypt.
Instead of a watershed for votes the entire event became a train wreck. Subsequently everything and anything is being done by the administration with what amounts to treason.
The odd part about this given all that has transpired regarding denial and false accusations coming from the White House is that the “The botched Hostage Scheme” is the only thing that really makes any sense.