Write in haste, repent at leisure.
The article
that appeared in this weekend’s TAS under the title “Obama
Fiddled While Benghazi burned… and an election approached” was one
that I wrote racing against a deadline.
While there is nothing I want to take back from this weekend’s
article, there are many things I’d like to add… for the sake of
readers who believe, as I do, that this story — this shameful but
instructive story of dereliction of duty in the highest office of
the land — should not be allowed to fade into the dimly remembered
past like a bad dream that is soon forgot.
For those who have paid close attention to the debate over
Benghazi over the past five months (and it became a debate even
before the clock struck midnight on Sept. 11, 2012), U.S. Defense
Secretary Leon Panetta’s testimony before the Senate Armed Forces
Committee on Thursday, Feb. 7, marked a real turning point.
In answering “no” to a few simple questions, Panetta blew up the
notion that the president and his team did the right thing on the
night of Sept. 11 — that they stayed awake worrying about the fate
of Ambassador Stevens and the others trapped at the consulate… and
set about working on some kind of a rescue mission.
- No, Panetta said, the president did not call to check on the
status of events in Benghazi after being told at 5 p.m. EST of the
outset of an all-out armed attack on the consulate;
- No, he said, there was no other follow-up from White House that
night;
- And no, there was no meeting that night pulling together the
president, the secretary of state, and other members of the much
photographed group that assembled in the situation room on the
night that Osama bin Laden was killed.
The president left Panetta and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman
General Martin Dempsey with the barest of instructions: It was “up
to them” to decide the proper response.
“You’d think” — as one reader of this weekend’s article
commented — “this guy (Obama) was average Joe on his bowling night,
not my problem.”
Exactly.
Blaming the video / Ignoring the threat
In his briefing on Sept. 13 — the day after the news of the death
of the American ambassador to Libya and three other staffers —
White House spokesman Jay Carney made the incredible claim: “This
is not a case of protests directed at the United States writ large
or at U.S. policy; this is in response to a video that is offensive
to Muslims.”
UN Secretary Susan Rice broadcast the same message — blaming the
video and ignoring the real threat to U.S. and other Western
democracies coming from Islamism — in doing a round of Sunday talk
shows on Sept. 16.
Obama was still blaming the video for the outbreak of violence
all around the Middle East as late as Sept. 26, when he addressed
the United Nations. And right up the Nov. 6 — and indeed right up
to the present moment — the president has continued to repeat the
mantra that Osama bin Laden is dead and Al Qaeda is on the run.
There were several variants of that in last week’s
State-of-the-Union address, including the assertion that “the
organization that attacked us on 9/11 [2001] is a shadow of its
former self.”
Whenever Obama speaks of outreach to the Muslim world, he sounds
like a professional diversity trainer at a big corporation worried
about lawsuits from disaffected employees — someone who fritters
away his time in dishing out politically correct pablum to captive
audiences.
It is time that the president stop believing his own rhetoric —
and wake up to what is going in the real world. He could start by
listening to what the Islamic extremists are really saying — which
is not that they want to live in harmony with people of other
beliefs and value systems, but rather that they want to undermine
and destroy their governments, their institutions, and their whole
way of life.
In his latest book
Notes on a Century, Bernard Lewis, the great Middle
Eastern historian, dismisses the notion that Islamists — or Muslim
fundamentalists, to give them another name — are overly sensitive
to criticisms of the Koran; rather, they are always spoiling for
battle, and will take any excuse that comes along. He
writes:
Muslim Fundamentalists are not worried about liberal theology
because there isn’t any, and they are not worried about criticism
of the Koran because that is not an issue. Muslims believe in the
literal divinity and inerrancy of the Koran text. But that’s not
the point. The Fundamentalists are concerned about something quite
different, which is what they see as the de-Islamization of Islamic
countries. What they want is to restore the Holy Law of Islam
(Shari’a), to remove legal codes that have been imported from
abroad, and to restore the full panoply of Islamic Law. They have
an encyclopedia of grievances, the most important of which is the
emancipation of women. In the speeches of Khomeini and the writings
of other Fundamentalists, that outranks all other grievances by
far.
In his new book, Lewis goes on to say:
As a close watcher of both events and discourse in the Muslim
world, I was appalled but not surprised by the events and attacks
of 9/11 (2001). As the militants saw it, they had completed the
first phase on the path to Muslim domination — the expulsion of the
infidels and their armies from the lands of Islam. The next and
final step was to carry the battle to the enemy’s homeland to
inaugurate the final struggle between the true believers and the
unbelievers for the mastery of the world and bring about the final
universal triumph of their cause.
This brand of Muslim extremism has been on the rise for more
than four decades, and it was considerably stronger on 9/11/2012
than it was on 9/11/2001 — as witness the recent installation of an
Islamist state in Egypt — the largest country in the Middle East
and, for many, many years, one of the most westernized and
moderate.
Enter Charles Woods, father of Tyrone Woods, the slain
former SEAL
Enter — we may say — and quick exit, as
far as having any impact on the Nov. 6 election.
On Sept 14, Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden went to
Andrews Air Force Base to be there to be part of the ceremonies
when the coffins of the four American victims of the assault on the
consulate arrived.
Later, they would all boast of the grief they felt.
In his second debate with Mitt Romney, Obama declared that he
was there “greeting the caskets and grieving with the families… and
that the suggestion that [he or] anyone on his team was playing
politics or misleading the American people, governor, is
offensive.”
Then there was the outrage (or feigned outrage) of
Hillary’s “What’s the difference” tirade in her long-delayed
Congressional testimony on January 24. She too backed this up with
an emotional account of going to receive the coffins of
co-workers.
And then there was Biden with his usual weird and oafish
behavior.
At Andrews Air Force base, all three of them managed to offend
Charles Woods, the father of Tyrone Woods, the slain former
SEAL.
Later, on Fox News, Charles Woods told Glenn Beck that Obama
“would not look me in the eye” and seemed to have “no remorse.”
He said he was stunned when Hillary told him that she would make
sure that the person who made the video “The Innocence of Muslims”
would be arrested and prosecuted. “She had to know she was not
telling the truth,” Woods said.
And, finally, and most embarrassingly, there were Biden’s
comments — “made in an extremely loud and boisterous voice” — who
said, among other things, “Did your son always have balls the size
of cue balls?”
Said Mr. Woods:
My question to the president would be this: Your Honor, I
respect your office as president. But if this attack on American
citizens, on American soil, happened 2,000 miles away from
Washington, D.C. — say in Los Angeles or in Seattle — would you
have waited for seven hours before you sent the first airplane?
Would you have waited seven hours until the attack was over? Would
have waited a couple of days until you had all of the videos and
all of the information before you responded in a responsible
military way?
Chip Bok, the cartoonist who illustrated my weekend article, did
another superb cartoon contrasting how the mainstream media
cheered Cindy Sheehan (who lost a son in Iraq and became a national
hero for camping out on George W. Bush’s doorstep) and ignored
Charles Woods. This was history in the making and, I fear, a nation
in the unmaking.
Presidential Dissembling
In late October
of last year, President Obama was caught off guard by a local
Denver TV reporter, Kyle Clark, who, so unlike the White House
press corps, persisted in asking real questions. Twice Obama
refused to say whether the Americans under siege in Benghazi were
denied requests for help.
But then he said:
Well, we are finding out exactly what happened. I can tell you,
as I’ve said over the last couple of months since this happened,
the minute I found out what was happening, I gave three very clear
directives. Number one, make sure that we are securing our
personnel and doing whatever we need to. Number two, we’re going to
investigate exactly what happened so that it doesn’t happen again.
And number three, find out who did this so that we can bring them
to justice.
But no one has been blamed or brought to justice — least of all
those at the pinnacle of government.
As Hillary said, what’s the difference?
As George Orwell said, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a
revolutionary act.” And then again: “He who controls the past
controls the future. He who controls the present controls the
past.”
Those who have retained the ability to think straight and act
with courage need to wrest control of the past from the present-day
masterminds who, if given the chance, will destroy
everything.
Photo: UPI
