Tuesday, October 30, 2012

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Careers Will Be Destroyed by Benghazi

Stanford Fellow Victor Davis Hanson offers a historian's perspective on the catastrophe in Benghazi.

...When the government systematically misleads and cannot establish a believable narrative, almost everyone involved is eventually tarred. The final chart of those officials in the Nixon White House who were devoured by Watergate was vast — and so it is becoming with the disaster in Libya. If we have learned anything from Watergate and Iran-Contra, it is that the longer officials deceive and obfuscate, the greater the number of wrecked careers and reputations...

...Most likely, the political wing of the White House almost immediately made a decision that the attack on our Benghazi consulate should not endanger the conventional narrative of a successful commander-in-chief — ahead in the polls in part because he had highlighted a supposedly successful foreign policy. Key to that story was the notion that the hit on bin Laden and the drone attacks on other Islamists had rendered al-Qaeda all but impotent...

...In such a landscape, Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans were brutally murdered. And almost immediately it was clear that the ambassador had earlier warned that Libya was descending into chaos and that Americans were not safe there — only to have his requests for further protection rejected.

During the actual assault on the consulate, a real-time video, streams of e-mail exchanges, and surveys of Islamist websites confirmed that al-Qaedists were carrying out a preplanned assassination — and over the next seven or eight hours it became clear that our staff was in dire need of military assistance that was somehow never sent. Then for nearly two weeks, the president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Press Secretary Jay Carney, and U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice advanced a counter-narrative that simply could not have been true: A spontaneous demonstration over a two-month-old video — just happening to coincide with the anniversary of 9/11 — got out of hand as some disruptive protesters showed up with machines gun, mortars, and RPGs and began killing Americans. Since it was an American religious bigot who had prompted such terrible but “natural” riots with his video that ridiculed and injured Islam, we should apologize for the uncouth among us in the strongest terms.

Obama, Clinton, Clapper, Rice, and Carney strove to outdo each other in damning the obscure video maker — to such an extent that he was summarily arrested on a supposedly outstanding probation charge. The message? Ambassadors die and careful U.S. foreign policy is undermined when right-wing bigots abuse their free-speech rights...

Hanson's next column should deal with the historic malfeasance of old media, a wholly owned subsidiary of the federal government.


Hat tip: Ame.

5 comments:

Brian said...

Facebook now in the censorship biz like everyone else in the media.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/10/30/Facebook-Censors-Navy-SEALS-To-Protect-Obama-on-Benghazi-Gate

The_Bad said...

Balderdash. No careers will be destroyed. Why? They're democrats.

"If we have learned anything from Watergate and Iran-Contra ..."

If we learned anything, we learned only conservatives get the microscope. How many careers were destroyed by the Clinton cover-up of perjury (and subsequent impeachment)?

The greater the depravity of a democrat, the higher they ascend within the ranks. Need I remind us all of Ted Kennedy?

Anonymous said...

I can't really agree with The Bad comment. True, most of the careers destroyed in the past have been Repubs , but these democrat/ socialist-muslims in power at present are so inept that they will truly destroy their own careers as they desperately try to lie their way out of the worst foreign policy debacle ever. Heads are starting to roll even now.

JTwig said...

Those other scandels ended careers because the media latched onto them, and didn't let go. Today the only mainstream media covering the story is FOX, which almost all other new organizations and lefties (I repeat myself) dismiss out of hand. Unless something major happens in the next few days, only a few low-levels peons will lose their jobs.

The_Bad said...

@Anon 5:48AM:

What heads are rolling? Anyone of real importance or notoriety? Not that I know of.

I hope you're right, but I'm not going to hold my breath.