GOP's Benghazi gambit neither practical nor plausible

Weeks before a Presidential election, a terrible tragedy occurred in Benghazi, Libya: a terrorist attack left four Americans dead, including the U.S. Ambassador. Politics is politics, so have at it. Since Americans went to the polls and re-elected President Obama to a second four-year term, however, treating Benghazi as Watergate 2.0 has become gratuitous.

There is a need to step out of the he-said-she-said moment. The entire premise that Susan Rice (our Ambassador to the United Nations) is under suspicion, or that any nominee to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State should be blocked until we get all the answers, is neither practical nor plausible.

NOT PRACTICAL

What happened in Benghazi was horrible and tragic, and very possibly preventable. But it shouldn't have taken The Daily Show's Jon Stewart to point out the intrinsic hypocrisy -- that Condoleezza Rice sailed through confirmation for Secretary of State despite having knowingly lied about Iraq's "weapons of mass destruction" while she was National Security Adviser -- and no one in the Bush administration was ever held to account for intelligence gaps in the lead-up to 9/11, when nearly 3,000 people were murdered by Al Qaeda on U.S. soil. The United States continues to face foreign policy challenges around the world, and tying up key Administration assets and distracting public attention does our national interest little good. Any changes we need to make in our security deployments and intelligence vetting will not be facilitated by a process that has been antagonistic since a few hours after the attack. We need a strong and credible Secretary of State. And as has been noted, the fact that many Republicans would be happy to see John Kerry nominated instead of Susan Rice carries the unseemly scent of partisan angling for his Senate seat.

NOT PLAUSIBLE

It makes little sense to argue that elements within the Obama administration would have opportunistically pushed the anti-U.S. protest angle in order to protect the President's anti-terrorism credentials ahead of the Presidential election. Even as a candidate four years ago, Barack Obama was being branded as naive for seeking to engage and win back the Arab and Islamic public. Mitt Romney consistently ridiculed Obama's foreign policy as the "apology tour", and blamed Obama's "appeasement" of radical Muslims even before the State Department had a chance to comment. With all this, if the Obama team were really looking to manipulate the information, it would have been far smarter to chalk up Benghazi to a one-off terrorist attack -- barely a blip amid the overall successful fight against Al-Qaeda. So, when Ambassador Rice went on all the Sunday morning shows and suggested the Consulate attack was connected to a current wave of popular protests across the Middle East, she was implicitly singing Romney's tune.

No one has been nominated yet to be the next Secretary of State, and it's not even clear how soon Secretary Clinton might choose to announce her own departure. The President won re-election with popular backing of his foreign policy performance, despite the early clamor over Benghazi. Republican Senators should settle down, and the Administration should follow the President's lead by not dignifying the attacks with anything beyond normal briefings and the investigation already underway.

Largely thanks to the Obama team's record of national security accomplishments, we again have real work to do, and the world is not waiting.

Mission Accomplished... does Libya count?

I wasn't planning to shout from the rooftops over the success of President Obama's smart-power strategy in Libya, though I had blogged early this year that Libya was an opportunity for him. Not a confounding challenge, like Iraq or Afghanistan, or Egypt or Syria, but nevertheless an opportunity to turn a fresh page, at least back to the limited-engagement days of Clinton and Bush (remember 41?). This may not have been a slam dunk, but let's at least give the President credit for a good rebound shot.

Six months ago, back when I first posted on this, lots of Republicans seemed to be goading the President into invading Libya. The disappointment was palpable when he threw in with our NATO allies and let them do most of the work -- with no ground invasion, and with limited firepower after the first days of giving the rebels a head start. And in the end, it's been estimated that the entire Libya engagement cost Washington less than $1 billion -- no casualties, no PTSD -- and far less than the cost of one day in Iraq after Bush's "Mission Accomplished" stunt.

Later, the Republicans' spent blood lust turned into anger that the imperial imperialist (Obama) needed to invoke the War Powers Act, even though President Bush (43) had invaded Iraq with only a vague contingency resolution from Congress, and in Libya no U.S. ground forces were committed. A few of my Republican friends have suddenly informed me they never even liked Bush's whole "democracy-building" agenda. Oh.

Mission Accomplished.

Any American, and anyone who believes in civilization, should be relieved and even pleased that Osama Bin Laden no longer walks this Earth. CNN and other news media have so redundantly explained the obvious reasons, I have no interest in repeating them here. He was evil. The legitimate concern about revenge attacks following his death should be balanced by the reality that most Al Qaeda supporters were already out to get "us" even before Sunday evening. The only reasons they haven't attacked more are a lack of capability or the success of anti-terrorism policies and practices worldwide.

The fact that Bin Laden had been living for years without phone or internet service, relying upon couriers who evidently conveyed only verbal commands based on personal visits to the compound, all confirms that he was not in operational command for some time. He had never really been the operational commander of Al Qaeda anyway, but the point is: Al Qaeda's tactical capabilities have not been significantly impacted, other than the disruptive value of documents and data acquired during the raid.

More than the direct relevance of Osama Bin Laden was the sidelining of the whole Al Qaeda ethos during the "Arab Spring". Despite murmurs of openings for Al Qaeda in Libya and Yemen, none of the uprisings or popular movements sweeping the Middle East has demonstrated any effective allegiance to Al Qaeda or Bin Laden, nor any functional collaboration. Al Qaeda has tried to catch up to history, but it's been a tough year. The Yemen-based cells remain a potent threat, but that has little or nothing to do with the public resistance to President Saleh.

Even the posthumous tears for Osama being shed by Hamas (and that's no revolution) are really tears of relief, for Osama and Al Qaeda would have gladly destroyed Hamas had they the opportunity. No one needed Osama out of the way more than Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.