Mitt Romney debating Benghazi with Barack Obama in a 2012 presidential debate.
In the 2012 presidential election, the biggest foreign policy issue was the killing of the US ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens in September of that year–an incident known by its location: Benghazi. Now, as we gear up for the 2016 presidential race, it looks like the biggest international issue is going to be–Benghazi.
The world is a big place, though you wouldn’t necessarily figure that out if you learned about it solely through electoral politics; in the debates between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney and their running mates in 2012 (FAIR Media Advisory, 10/26/12), there were 14 questions raised about other countries, and only one of those questions (about China) had to do with anyplace outside the Middle East (broadly defined, from Pakistan to Libya). And three of the 14 questions had to do with Benghazi–as many questions as were asked about Afghanistan, where at the time the US had more than 60,000 troops engaged in a ground war.
Since what actually happened at Benghazi seems to have little relationship to the accepted Beltway narrative about Benghazi, it seems unlikely that once again revolving a presidential election’s international discussion around the incident will shed much light on the choices facing the US in the world. But one could hope, at least, that the discussion would broaden beyond what the Obama administration and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did or did not do on September 11, 2012, and look at the conscious policy choices made by Obama and Clinton around Libya that led to the Benghazi assault.
That’s why I was encouraged when I saw the headline on a New York Times op-ed (10/23/15): “Forget Benghazi. What About Libya?”
And why I was so disappointed when I actually read the column.
David Tafuri discussing Syria on CNN.
It was written by David Tafuri, who used to work for the State Department helping to facilitate the occupation of Iraq, and then worked as a lawyer for the Libyan forces on whose behalf the United States intervened to overthrow the Libyan government of Moammar Gadhafi. Unsurprisingly, his main complaint about US intervention is that there wasn’t enough of it. He describes Clinton as
one of the chief architects of the NATO intervention that saved tens of thousands of lives and freed Libya from the grips of Colonel Qaddafi’s brutal 42-year dictatorship. That would have been a signature foreign policy achievement for Mrs. Clinton and President Obama had the United States not disengaged in Libya.
NATO intervention saved tens of thousands of lives? Not according to Tafuri’s client, the post-intervention government of Libya, which said (AP, 9/8/11) that at least 30,000 people died in the successful effort to overthrow the Libyan government, about half of whom were government security forces. The government later reduced its estimate to as many as 11,500 killed on both sides in the overthrow of Gadhafi; roughly 5,000 have died in the ongoing civil war since then (Foreign Affairs, 3-4/15). Perhaps Tafuri means that these 17,500 or so actual deaths prevented tens of thousands of hypothetical deaths–but casual readers are likely to miss that subtlety.
If the Times hadn’t gone to someone who had lobbied for the Libyan intervention, they might have gotten a different take on it. For example, political scientist Alan Kuperman wrote a policy brief for Harvard’s Belfer Center (9/13) which maintained that
NATO’s action magnified the conflict’s duration about sixfold and its death toll at least sevenfold, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors. If Libya was a “model intervention,” then it was a model of failure.
That’s a perspective that, if brought into the presidential campaign, could actually spark a meaningful debate about US foreign policy.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Margaret Sullivan: public@nytimes.com (Twitter: @NYTimes or @Sulliview). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.
Great.
AND what was going on at these “outposts” in the first place? The weapons, the money, the detainments, the tortures, the, the what else?…. Truly bizarre how the “media” elides it all.
I have a relative who is a diplomat. I asked about this situation, and she said that this compound was not at the level of an embassy in regards to security. I haven’t done any research as to what Christopher Stevens was doing there, how much time he spent there, etc. My relative said that at the average embassy, security is very good. Perhaps this wasn’t a place meant for diplomats to spend much time in. That said, Clinton doesn’t give me confidence in any of her decisions.
ROOTCAUSE
What a person feels they deserve, because of a gift, a right or an income, this is their goal to achieve, their high watermark in life and it controls every aspect of their mind, character and personality. Feel you deserve less and you give to those who have less, feel you deserve more and you take all you can take.
Problem is, until people realize the harm in it, most everyone feels they deserve to be rich and this causes them to be sucker-bait and so easy to be controlled by the rich.
So, the more wealth one has all the more are they willing to fight to get wealth and to kill to protect wealth. Which is why, owned by the corporate rich is all of mainstream media, publishing and entertainment industry. In actuality, all means of public communications and it being pure propaganda, a fake morality and illusion of reality that creates a fiction existence.
I’m no fan of Hillary, and I’m actually politically to the left of Bernie. That being said, I have to say that this whole Benghazi / Clinton e-mails stuff is 99% Republican political distraction-ism. They ultimately don’t give a good god-damn about a few US citizens killed in Benghazi (after all, the Republicans are the bellicose party that took us to war in Afghanistan, Iraq, and pushed military intervention everywhere else, resulting in 100s of thousands dead,including thousands of US soldiers) or some nuances of overly-classified e-mails being sent via private e-mail – – – it’s all strictly banal electioneering politics. They are doing it to: 1.) score political points with the politically naive who get their news from Fox or even CNN, & 2.) to fill up the 2-3 minutes a newscast (i.e.; that the networks DO actually spend on national politics) with something that helps their agenda and — even MORE importantly — keeps more important things that the Republicans don’t want on the news (climate change, militarization, TPP, etc) OFF the newscast, to a great degree.
“Now, as we gear up for the 2016 presidential race, it looks like the biggest international issue is going to be–Benghazi.”
Hey, Jim why are you implying the Hillary Clinton will get the nomination here?
Benghazi isn’t an issue if Sanders is the nominee.