That title is not mine; it’s taken from an excellent article by Peggy Noonan at the Wall Street Journal titled The Inconvenient Truth About Benghazi. Noonan went a little wobbly back in the 2008 campaign when she, like so many others, let her emotions overrule her commonsense judgment about Barack Obama. This latest posting at the WSJ shows she’s stable and clear headed once again. In fact, it is the best explanation I’ve read yet as to why there was no effective military response by American forces.
Quite simply, there was no aggressive response because, as we’ve long suspected, a political decision was made early on not to respond. It was not that we didn’t have forces available, both air assets and troops, ready and able to intervene; despite all the excuses made by the administration and even our dishonorable military commanders, it wasn’t that we couldn’t do something, it was because a decision had been made that we were not going to do anything.
As Noonan explains, the truth that this was a terrorist attack was politically inconvenient to the Obama 2012 re-election campaign. The Democrats, including their leader, had been gloating that with the demise of Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda was dead, no longer a serious threat to American interests. An Al Qaeda led attack on a sovereign American possession, even on foreign soil, put the lie to that boast. More importantly, such aggression by Al Qaeda required an aggressive response by our military forces.
On the other hand, and this is where Noonan nails it, a mere out of control demonstration by angry Muslims, outraged over a sophomoric You Tube video, would not require a military response. In fact, an American military response to a mere riot would be a clearly inappropriate intervention into the sovereign affairs of Libya. And right there, folks, is the answer as to why the orders to stand down were issued. In order to meet the political needs of the Obama re-election campaign, this event could not be seen as a terrorist attack so it was hurriedly morphed into a deadly demonstration incited by an American-made video.
The political decision to remake this Al Qaeda attack into a demonstration didn’t come from the military, even though the current command structure is clearly carrying water for the Obama administration; nor did it come, as the White house has claimed, from the intelligence community. The recent congressional whistleblower testimony makes that clear. So that leaves Hillary Clinton’s State Department and Obama’s White House, most likely working in collusion, to create the false narrative. Their motive seems fairly simple: maintaining Democrat control of the executive branch.
That’s cold, really cold; a political decision is made that a terrorist attack must be presented to American voters as a demonstration and therefore no military response is possible, no matter how dire the consequences may become for those under attack. As we now know, it was a death sentence for four Americans, one of whom was our ambassador to that country. What we don’t know is who the scheming, calculating politicos were who made that cold, deadly decision.
Not yet anyway…
Go read Noonan’s entire article for the best dissection of this political scheme to date.
Crossposted at American Thinker.
