Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s Politically Incompetent Campaign Should Not Cause Us to Overlook President Obama’s Transgressions against Sensible Policy — for Example, the Deaths of American Ambassador Christopher Stevens and His Colleagues

21 September 2012

Introduction — it is difficult to re-orient a leader’s bad direction(s), when we reward him with re-election

Yesterday, I criticized the Commander in Chief for his cowardly failure to grapple with murderous geopolitical and military incompetence in Afghanistan, using Marine Lance Corporal Greg Buckley Junior’s death as an example.

Today, I use Glenn Greenwald’s thoughtful essay about the Libyan mess that President Obama created to point out that the Commander in Chief’s cynically indulged and ineptitude-concealing deceit is characteristic of his leadership style.

Why this matters

When the political choice is between two obvious evils, it is easy to see the lesser evil as significantly more golden than it actually is.

My concern about the United States’ future has been magnified by the current presidential campaign, which pits two demonstrably bad leadership choices against each other. Not only is neither man able to provide the vision the country needs, both are consistently blatant liars.

As a result of their shared and deceit-filled incompetence, the 2012 presidential campaign is about issues that do not exist, “strawed up” as substitutes for problems that do.

The United States is living through a period of (hopefully temporary) insanity.

We won’t get anywhere better, until we recognize how self-destructively sick our political times are.

Citation — to “liberal” columnist Glenn Greenwald’s criticism of the President’s Libyan mess

Glenn Greenwald, Obama officials' spin on Benghazi attack mirrors Bin Laden raid untruths, The Guardian (United Kingdom) (20 September 2012)

Critics initially jumped on prominent Republicans for suggesting that President Obama’s incompetence had had a hand in inviting Ambassador Stevens’ death — now it appears that these critics probably had a legitimate point

It is curious how one can never rationally shut someone else’s thinking out, simply because they are “extreme.” Sometimes, the alleged fringe exposes flaws in our perspectives.

This seems to have been so with the Benghazi consulate attack, which took the lives of Ambassador Christopher Stevens, information officer Sean Smith, and former Navy SEALs, Tyrone S. Woods and Glen A. Doherty.

“Liberal” Glenn Greenwald joined “conservative” Republican Party critics of the Administration’s duplicitous account of what happened in Benghazi

Mr. Greenwald began his essay yesterday by reminding readers of the opinion-distorting lies that the Administration told about Osama bin Laden’s death.

Namely, that bin Laden was downed in a gun battle, had hidden behind his wife, and was living in a million dollar-plus mansion — when in fact he was living in squalor, never hid behind anyone, and was extinguished while lying on the floor seriously wounded.

Note

Not that any of these corrections would have changed my mind about the moral or military legitimacy of his execution.

Greenwald continued:

We now see exactly the same pattern emerging with the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya and the killing of the US ambassador.

For a full week now, administration officials have categorically insisted that the prime, if not only, cause of the attack was spontaneous anger over the anti-Muhammad film, The Innocence of Muslims.

As it turns out, this claim is almost certainly false.

For proof, Greenwald turns to a McClatchy Newspapers account of the pertinent Senate committee hearing:

“I would say they were killed in the course of a terrorist attack,” said Matthew Olsen, director of the National Counterterrorism Center, told the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.

His comments came as significant questions persisted about the consulate’s security:

The attack took place on the anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on the U.S.; Americans were known to be under threat, and Benghazi had experienced a string of attacks on foreign targets during the summer.

Moreover, Libya remains plagued by armed groups nearly a year after the U.S.-backed ouster of the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi. Yet the facility was primarily defended by local guards who may have been complicit.

The head of Libya’s interim government, key U.S. lawmakers and experts contend that the attack appeared long-planned, complex and well-coordinated, matching descriptions given to McClatchy last week by the consulate’s landlord and a wounded security guard, who denied there was a protest at the time and said the attackers carried the banner of Ansar al Shariah, an Islamist militia.

Since the fall of Gadhafi last year, Libya’s security has been dependent on a group of armed militias, including Ansar al Shariah, that represent a wide variety of political strains and interests and remain heavily armed with weapons looted from Gadhafi storehouses.

Interior Ministry forces and the Supreme Security Committee have been accused of complicity in recent attacks by Islamic fundamentalists on mosques and shrines affiliated with the moderate Sufi strain of Islam.

© 2012 Jonathan S. Landay, U.S. official calls Benghazi consulate assault ‘terrorist attack’ amid tough questioning over security, McClatchy Newspapers (19 September 2012) (paragraphs split and reformatted)

The McClatchy report goes on to provide supporting details.

The Libyan problem — was very probably exacerbated by this Administration’s own actions in March 2011

The problem with President Obama’s (allied) intervention to depose former Libyan dictator Colonel Muammar Qaddafi more than a year ago was that it awakened a host of foreseeable geopolitical problems that are now rebounding to bite us.

Note

I opposed the idea of Libyan intervention here, here, here, and here (in chronological order). And I linked to the conservative Cato Institute’s Doug Bandow’s summary of why intervention proved to have been a mistake, here.

These behind-biting problems include the fact that stores of potent military arms are now floating around the Middle East in the hands of people opposed to U.S. interests, possibly including the terrorists who killed Ambassador Stevens and his protectors.

Equally important, the American Libyan civil war intervention of spring 2011 unnecessarily fueled hostilities with some Islamic factions. Bandow and I addressed that probability last year. Greenwald does so again now:

Critics of the war in Libya warned that the US was siding with (and arming and empowering) violent extremists, including al-Qaida elements, that would eventually cause the US to claim it had to return to Libya to fight against them – just as its funding and arming of Saddam in Iraq and the mujahideen in Afghanistan subsequently justified new wars against those one-time allies.

War critics also argued that the intervention would bring massive instability and suffering to the people of Libya; today, the Washington Post reports that – just as the "president of Afghanistan" is really the mayor of Kabul and the "Iraqi government" long exercised sovereignty only in Baghdad's Green Zone – the central Libyan government exercises little authority outside of Tripoli.

And intervention critics also warned that dropping bombs in a country and killing civilians, no matter how noble the intent supposedly is, would produce blowback in the form of those who would then want to attack the US.

When the White House succeeded in falsely blaming the consulate attacks on anger over this video, all of those facts were obscured.

The truth, now that it is emerging, underscores how unstable, lawless and dangerous Libya has become – far from the grand success story war proponents like to tell.

The disutility of a short national memory

Surveying today’s media makes it clear that Americans have already forgotten the origins of America’s Libyan intervention.

A flea’s inability to remember anything makes it unlikely that “we” will ever learn anything.

The moral? — The Obama Administration lied to cover up its almost certain incompetence in (a) intervening in Libya and then (b) leaving Ambassador Stevens and colleagues in harm’s way the following year

Notice the callous similarity to Lance Corporal Greg Buckley Junior’s death in Afghanistan?

When “we” don’t care, getting you killed doesn’t matter. Courageous volunteers in service to the national interest are expendable.

It is the President’s cynically self-serving use of American military forces that has turned me into one of his most unrelenting critics. His dishonorable and lying persona consistently violates my sense of the leadership ethics that should characterize any American Commander in Chief.

Governor Romney, who easily out-does the President in egregious mendacity, would not be better.

That is the sorrow of the 2012 election. America has selected two ethically challenged mediocrities to lead it, at a time when brilliance and honor are called for.

PeteFree.com

Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney’s Politically Incompetent Campaign Should Not Cause Us to Overlook President Obama’s Transgressions against Sensible Policy — for Example, the Deaths of American Ambassador Christopher Stevens and His Colleagues