In FrontPage this morning I discuss the heads rolling at the State Department:
After
an independent report found that mistakes were made in the Obama
Administration’s handling of the Benghazi jihad massacre, Barack Obama
immediately took action against those who apparently made them: Eric
Boswell, the assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security;
Charlene Lamb, the deputy assistant secretary responsible for embassy
security; and Raymond Maxwell, the deputy assistant secretary of state
whose purview included Libya, Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco, all resigned under pressure.The report says
that “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at
senior levels within two bureaus” led to a security arrangement “that
was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the
attack that took place.”Are we really to believe that it was Eric Boswell, Charlene Lamb, and
Raymond Maxwell who were really responsible for the refusal of repeated
requests from the Benghazi consulate for more security personnel, and
the complete disregarding of warnings from Ambassador Chris Stevens that
al-Qaeda was operating in the area? There are numerous indications that
all this came from higher up.After all, the Obama Administration’s entire Middle East policy has
since January 2011 been predicated on the unquestioned dogma that the
“Arab Spring” uprisings were a glorious outpouring of democracy and
pluralism. Speaking about the Libyan revolution in March 2011, Obama
warmly praised the dawning in Libya of “the rights of peaceful assembly,
free speech, and the ability of the Libyan people to determine their
own destiny.” Thus after providing military aid to the anti-Gaddafi
rebels despite evidence of their al-Qaeda links, the administration —
whether the call really came from the White House or the State
Department or both — had every reason to ignore the request from
Benghazi for more security, and to pretend that the whole thing was just
a spontaneous uprising over a video about Muhammad, not the carefully
planned September 11 jihad attack that it proved to be.Speaking about Susan Rice, the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, the New York Times
said that “the report affirmed there were no protests of an
anti-Islamic video before the attack, contrary to what Ms. Rice had said
on several Sunday talk shows days after the attack.”But Susan Rice was in an extremely difficult position. To have
acknowledged what was really happening in Benghazi would have been to
admit that the Allahu-akbaring mob besieging the consulate was nothing
remotely close to a responsible citizenry enjoying their rights of
peaceful assembly, free speech, and self-determination. And that would
have given the lie to Obama’s description of the uprising against
Gaddafi. It would have been to admit that the jihad against the United
States would not be turned away from its goal by hearts-and-minds
gestures, even if those gestures included the removal of a brutal
dictator. The people of Benghazi were no more inclined to welcome the
Americans as liberators — and Ambassador Stevens had attempted to play
exactly that role, sneaking into Libya during the most difficult days of
the uprising and doing everything he could to aid the rebels — than
were the people of Iraq when Saddam Hussein was toppled.The reason in both cases was the same: the rebels against both Saddam
and Gaddafi were largely Islamic supremacists who wanted a Sharia
state, disdained democracy, and considered the United States to be their
enemy not primarily because of various aspects of its foreign policy,
but because it is the world’s foremost infidel polity, against whom the
mujahedin believe they have a sacred duty to wage war. The Qur’an and
Islamic law direct Muslims to wage war against and subjugate the “People
of the Book” (cf. Qur’an 9:29) — that is, primarily Jews and Christians
— not if they behave badly by supporting Israel or Middle Eastern
dictators, but simply because they are not Muslims.But the White House and State Department not only do not acknowledge
this fact — they have done all they can to deny and obfuscate it. The
one cardinal proposition that accepted analysts must repeat is that the
present conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims have absolutely
nothing to do with Islam; indeed, Obama Administration officials are
expressly forbidden to link Islam with terrorism, as if Islamic
terrorists weren’t busy linking the two on a daily basis. The errors of
analysis and wrong decisions that cost lives all follow from this
initial false premise.