Arkady
President
If anyone had honestly still been under the impression that Benghazi was a real scandal on not a faux outrage manufactured by a bunch of hypocritical Republican partisans, the questioning of Hillary Clinton should have put that to a rest. There was such a dramatic (and hilarious) gulf between the substance (nit-picking critiques, along with obsessing over stuff that didn't make one bit of difference), and the rhetoric (which sounded like what you might expect in the aftermath of an attack that left hundreds or thousands dead).
Look, there's no question mistakes were made in the lead-up to that attack. When you look back at pretty much any event where people were killed, you're going to identify missteps, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I'm all for doing a close investigation into these events -- even the small-scale ones that leave only three or four Americans dead, like Benghazi. That's how we learn and improve operations in the future. But that's not what these hearings are about. They aren't about better understanding missteps in order to avoid them in the future, they're about conducting a witch-hunt in the hopes of partisan advantage. At first they were about forcing Obama to give up on his first choice for the Secretary of State position. Now they're about trying to tarnish Hillary Clinton ahead of a possible 2016 presidential run.
It would be easy to suggest that partisans of both sides do this kind of thing -- building mountains out of molehills to hurt their political opponents. But there really is a noticeable difference between the parties. Take the attacks on Sana'a, Yemen. Do you remember those? Probably not, because Democrats never turned the investigations into media circuses for partisan gain. But there were two separate attacks on our embassy in Yemen. The first killed two people and the second killed 19. Since they happened on Bush's watch, there was of course no Republican-led witch-hunt. There were quieter investigations aimed at identifying improvements we could make in the future.
Karachi is another example. There were four separate attacks on the same consulate, with one resulting in twelve deaths, and the fourth attack resulting in the death of our diplomat, David Foy. The zealots howling for scandal in the wake of Benghazi were quiet after the Karachi consulate attacks, as well as after the Jeddah raid on a diplomatic compound that killed 9, and a number of other similar deadly attacks in recent years. Why? Because Bush was president and attacks like that are only scandalous if a Democrat is president.
Imagine if Benghazi weren't a single, isolated attack. Imagine that the same facility had been attacked three prior times, over the course of Obama's four years, with two of those resulting in deaths. Imagine that only after those prior attacks did the attack take place that resulted in the death of our ambassador. That would make it very similar to what happened in Karachi during the Bush years. If the same pattern of repeated deadly attacks and repeated failures to secure the facility had preceded the Benghazi attack, the Republicans would have gone absolutely insane. But in Karachi the Republicans were in charge, so it was no big deal.
The US is a very big and extraordinarily engaged nation. Between our embassies and consulates, we have about 300 diplomatic facilities around the world, many in remote hot-spots where providing adequate security is difficult. That's why there have always been successful attacks on our diplomatic missions. It's dangerous work. The law of averages say that even with competent management we'll have security failures and bad judgment calls, from time to time, that leave some Americans dead. Nobody's perfect. It's always been that way, and the best we can do is work on improving operations by learning from past mistakes. The good news is that attacks on our diplomatic missions have been relatively uncommon during the Obama years:
And it's further good news the attacks that have taken place have been relatively unsuccessful -- leaving just a handful of people dead, rather than the hundreds or thousands that have been killed in other terrorist attacks over the years. We've seen nothing, so far, like the Clinton-era embassy bombings, much less the Reagan-era bombing in Beruit. Maybe we have, in fact, learned some lessons.
Look, there's no question mistakes were made in the lead-up to that attack. When you look back at pretty much any event where people were killed, you're going to identify missteps, with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. I'm all for doing a close investigation into these events -- even the small-scale ones that leave only three or four Americans dead, like Benghazi. That's how we learn and improve operations in the future. But that's not what these hearings are about. They aren't about better understanding missteps in order to avoid them in the future, they're about conducting a witch-hunt in the hopes of partisan advantage. At first they were about forcing Obama to give up on his first choice for the Secretary of State position. Now they're about trying to tarnish Hillary Clinton ahead of a possible 2016 presidential run.
It would be easy to suggest that partisans of both sides do this kind of thing -- building mountains out of molehills to hurt their political opponents. But there really is a noticeable difference between the parties. Take the attacks on Sana'a, Yemen. Do you remember those? Probably not, because Democrats never turned the investigations into media circuses for partisan gain. But there were two separate attacks on our embassy in Yemen. The first killed two people and the second killed 19. Since they happened on Bush's watch, there was of course no Republican-led witch-hunt. There were quieter investigations aimed at identifying improvements we could make in the future.
Karachi is another example. There were four separate attacks on the same consulate, with one resulting in twelve deaths, and the fourth attack resulting in the death of our diplomat, David Foy. The zealots howling for scandal in the wake of Benghazi were quiet after the Karachi consulate attacks, as well as after the Jeddah raid on a diplomatic compound that killed 9, and a number of other similar deadly attacks in recent years. Why? Because Bush was president and attacks like that are only scandalous if a Democrat is president.
Imagine if Benghazi weren't a single, isolated attack. Imagine that the same facility had been attacked three prior times, over the course of Obama's four years, with two of those resulting in deaths. Imagine that only after those prior attacks did the attack take place that resulted in the death of our ambassador. That would make it very similar to what happened in Karachi during the Bush years. If the same pattern of repeated deadly attacks and repeated failures to secure the facility had preceded the Benghazi attack, the Republicans would have gone absolutely insane. But in Karachi the Republicans were in charge, so it was no big deal.
The US is a very big and extraordinarily engaged nation. Between our embassies and consulates, we have about 300 diplomatic facilities around the world, many in remote hot-spots where providing adequate security is difficult. That's why there have always been successful attacks on our diplomatic missions. It's dangerous work. The law of averages say that even with competent management we'll have security failures and bad judgment calls, from time to time, that leave some Americans dead. Nobody's perfect. It's always been that way, and the best we can do is work on improving operations by learning from past mistakes. The good news is that attacks on our diplomatic missions have been relatively uncommon during the Obama years:
And it's further good news the attacks that have taken place have been relatively unsuccessful -- leaving just a handful of people dead, rather than the hundreds or thousands that have been killed in other terrorist attacks over the years. We've seen nothing, so far, like the Clinton-era embassy bombings, much less the Reagan-era bombing in Beruit. Maybe we have, in fact, learned some lessons.
