What really went wrong
The intelligence and security failings that surrounded the murders of four Americans in Libya are coming into focus as far more fundamental than depicted in jousting between Republican Mitt Romney and President Obama.
Romney has concentrated on the administration’s shifting characterizations of the Benghazi assault that took the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three colleagues. Romney’s thrust has been that officials downplayed the events as a terrorist attack to minimize political damage.
With some evidence, Obama has denied the charge, but the administration has been at a complete loss to tell a coherent story. The President and Secretary of State Clinton said they take full responsibility — but for what, exactly, is unclear.
So, too, the question of how much of the onus Obama intends to bear. After saying he accepts the burdens of office, he tried to skate by the mortal debacle by declaring, “When four Americans get killed, it’s not optimal.” No, it’s an outrage that demands accountability. Thus far, an all-but-anonymous State Department functionary has taken the heat for declining to provide what would have been a minimal boost in security at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, not at the consulate that was attacked in Benghazi.
As bad a call as that was, the larger emerging picture is that Obama and his top aides failed to comprehend how highly dangerous Libya was before they dispatched Stevens there. Then, the administration further let Stevens down as the dire nature of the peril became apparent to him.
What the Obama team failed to recognize was the tectonic impact of the Arab Spring. Across the region, popular revolutions weakened or did away with governing institutions, including intelligence services, that had kept violence-prone Islamists in check, however repressively.
In Libya, the war that toppled Moammar Khadafy further boosted the empowerment of radicals. Supplied with arms, tribal bands and militias became disciplined fighters and claimed power beside the country’s infant government.
Such was the environment in which Stevens led a delegation seeking to win the hearts and minds of Libyans, many of whom were adamantly hostile. It is no surprise, then, that in the months before his death, Stevens saw increasing danger.
In June, he cabled Washington that “Islamic extremism appears to be on the rise in eastern Libya” and that “the Al Qaeda flag has been spotted several times flying over government buildings and training facilities.”
In August, he notified State: “Islamist extremists are able to attack the Red Cross with relative impunity. What we have seen are not random crimes of opportunity, but rather targeted and discriminate attacks.”
Stevens added, “Attackers are unlikely to be deterred until authorities are at least as capable.”
On Sept. 11, the day he died: Libyan security was “too weak to keep the country secure.”
Tragically, no one in Washington — not the State Department, not the CIA, not the President — awakened to the forces that had come into play in Libya and beyond. Stevens was left to face the furies in what all belatedly acknowledge was a highly orchestrated terror attack.
That the U.S. came up short on security was but an outgrowth of a basic misjudgment as to who was in charge in Libya: friends or enemies.
And nothing demonstrates how badly the administration got it wrong than the fact that Ahmad Abu Khattala, identified as an attack ringleader, scoffs at Obama’s pledge to bring the guilty to justice while sipping mango juice on a hotel patio and sitting for an interview with The New York Times.