Caroline Glick
The New York Times
just delivered a mortal blow to the Obama administration and its Middle
East policy. Call it fratricide. It was clearly unintentional. Indeed,
is far from clear that the paper realizes what it has done.
Last Saturday the Times published an 8,000-word account by
David Kirkpatrick detailing the terrorist strike against the US
Consulate and the CIA annex in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012.
In it, Kirkpatrick tore to shreds the foundations of President Barack
Obama’s counterterrorism strategy and his overall policy in the Middle
East.
Obama first enunciated those foundations in his June 4, 2009, speech
to the Muslim world at Cairo University. Ever since, they have been the
rationale behind US counterterror strategy and US Middle East policy.
Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently
hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical
Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become
US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical
Muslims).
Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic
group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of
al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman
al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed
through force.
The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core
al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other
group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to
Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist
group or a US enemy.
These foundations have led the US to negotiate with the Taliban in
Afghanistan. They are the rationale for the US’s embrace of the Muslim
Brotherhood worldwide. They are the basis for Obama’s allegiance to
Turkey’s Islamist government, and his early support for the Muslim
Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.
They are the basis for the administration’s kneejerk support for the PLO against Israel.
Obama’s insistent bid to appease Iran, and so enable the mullocracy
to complete its nuclear weapons program. is similarly a product of his
strategic assumptions. So, too, the US’s current diplomatic engagement
of Hezbollah in Lebanon owes to the administration’s conviction that any
terror group not directly connected to Zawahiri is a potential US ally.
From the outset of the 2011 revolt against the regime of Muammar
Gaddafi in Libya, it was clear that a significant part of the opposition
was composed of jihadists aligned if not affiliated with al-Qaida.
Benghazi was specifically identified by documents seized by US forces in
Iraq as a hotbed of al-Qaida recruitment.
Obama and his advisers dismissed and ignored the evidence. The core
of al-Qaida, they claimed, was not involved in the anti-Gaddafi revolt.
And to the extent jihadists were fighting Gaddafi, they were doing so as
allies of the US.
In other words, the two core foundations of Obama’s understanding of
terrorism and of the Muslim world were central to US support for the
overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi.
With Kirkpatrick’s report, the Times exposed the utter falsity of both.
Kirkpatrick showed the mindset of the US-supported rebels and through
it, the ridiculousness of the administration’s belief that you can’t be
a terrorist if you aren’t directly subordinate to Zawahiri.
One US-supported Islamist militia commander recalled to him that at the
outset of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion, “Teenagers came running around…
[asking] ‘Sheikh, sheikh, did you know al-Qaida? Did you know Osama bin
Laden? How do we fight?”
In the days and weeks following the September 11, 2012, attack on the
US installations in Benghazi in which US ambassador to Libya
Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed, the
administration claimed that the attacks were not carried out by
terrorists. Rather they were the unfortunate consequence of a
spontaneous protest by otherwise innocent Libyans.
According to the administration’s version of events, these guileless,
otherwise friendly demonstrators, who killed the US ambassador and
three other Americans, were simply angered by a YouTube video of a movie
trailer which jihadist clerics in Egypt had proclaimed was blasphemous.
In an attempt to appease the mob after the fact, Obama and
then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton shot commercials run on
Pakistani television apologizing for the video and siding with the mob
against the movie-maker, who is the only person the US has imprisoned
following the attack. Then-ambassador to the UN and current National
Security Adviser Susan Rice gave multiple television interviews placing
the blame for the attacks on the video.
According to Kirkpatrick’s account of the assault against the US
installations in Benghazi on September 11, 2012, the administration’s
description of the assaults was a fabrication. Far from spontaneous
political protests spurred by rage at a YouTube video, the attack was
premeditated.
US officials spotted Libyans conducting surveillance of the consulate nearly 15 hours before the attack began.
Libyan militia warned US officials “of rising threats against
Americans from extremists in Benghazi,” two days before the attack.
From his account, the initial attack – in which the consulate was
first stormed – was carried out not by a mob, but by a few dozen
fighters. They were armed with assault rifles. They acted in a
coordinated, professional manner with apparent awareness of US security
procedures.
During the initial assault, the attackers shot down the lights around
the compound, stormed the gates, and swarmed around the security
personnel who ran to get their weapons, making it impossible for them to
defend the ambassador and other personnel trapped inside.
According to Kirkpatrick, after the initial attack, the organizers
spurred popular rage and incited a mob assault on the consulate by
spreading the rumor that the Americans had killed a local. Others
members of the secondary mob, Kirkpatrick claimed, were motivated by
reports of the video.
This mob assault, which followed the initial attack and apparent
takeover of the consulate, was part of the predetermined plan. The
organizers wanted to produce chaos.
As Kirkpatrick explained, “The attackers had posted sentries at
Venezia Road, adjacent to the [consulate] compound, to guard their rear
flank, but they let pass anyone trying to join the mayhem.”
According to Kirkpatrick, the attack was perpetrated by local
terrorist groups that were part of the US-backed anti-Gaddafi coalition.
The people who were conducting the surveillance of the consulate 15
hours before the attack were uniformed security forces who escaped in an
official car. Members of the militia tasked with defending the compound
participated in the attack.
Ambassador Stevens, who had served as the administration’s emissary
to the rebels during the insurrection against Gaddafi, knew personally
many of the terrorists who orchestrated the attack. And until the very
end, he was taken in by the administration’s core belief that it was
possible to appease al-Qaida-sympathizing Islamic jihadists who were not
directly affiliated with Zawahiri.
As Kirkpatrick noted, Stevens “helped shape the Obama
administration’s conviction that it could work with the rebels, even
those previously hostile to the West, to build a friendly, democratic
government.”
The entire US view that local militias, regardless of their
anti-American, jihadist ideologies, could become US allies was
predicated not merely on the belief that they could be appeased, but
that they weren’t terrorists because they weren’t al-Qaida proper.
As Kirkpatrick notes, “American intelligence efforts in Libya
concentrated on the agendas of the biggest militia leaders and the
handful of Libyans with suspected ties to al-Qaida. The fixation on
al-Qaida might have distracted experts from more imminent threats.”
But again, the only reason that the intelligence failed to notice the
threats emanating from local US-supported terrorists is because the US
counterterrorist strategy, like its overall Middle East strategy, is to
seek to appease all US enemies other than the parts of al-Qaida directly
commanded by Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Distressingly, most of the discussion spurred by Kirkpatrick’s
article has ignored the devastating blow he visited on the intellectual
foundations of Obama’s foreign policy. Instead, the discussion has
focused on his claim that there is “no evidence that al-Qaida or other
international terrorist group had any role in the assault,” and on his
assertion that the YouTube video did spur to action some of the
participants in the assault.
Kirkpatrick’s claim that al-Qaida played no role in the attack was refuted by the Times’
own reporting six weeks after the attack. It has also been refuted by
congressional and State Department investigations, by the UN and by a
raft of other reporting.
His claim that the YouTube video did spur some of the attackers to
action was categorically rejected last spring in sworn congressional
testimony by then-deputy chief of the US mission to Libya Gregory Hicks.
Last May Hicks stated, “The YouTube video was a non-event in Libya.
The video was not instigative of anything that was going on in Libya. We
saw no demonstrators related to the video anywhere in Libya.”
Kirkpatrick’s larger message – that the reasoning behind Obama’s
entire counterterrorist strategy and his overall Middle East policy is
totally wrong, and deeply destructive – has been missed because his
article was written and published to whitewash the administration’s
deliberate mischaracterization of the events in Benghazi, not to
discredit the rationale behind its Middle East policy and
counterterrorism strategy. This is why he claimed that al-Qaida wasn’t
involved in the attack. And this is why he claimed that the YouTube
video was a cause for the attack.
This much was made clear in a blog post by editorial page editor
Andrew Rosenthal, who alleged that the entire discourse on Benghazi is
promoted by the Republicans to harm the Democrats, and Kirkpatrick’s
story served to weaken the Republican arguments. In Rosenthal’s words,
“The Republicans hope to tarnish Democratic candidates by making it seem
as though Mr. Obama doesn’t take al-Qaida seriously.”
So pathetically, in a bid to defend Obama and Clinton and the rest of the Democrats, the Times
published a report that showed that Obama’s laser-like focus on the
Zawahiri-controlled faction of al-Qaida has endangered the US.
By failing to view as enemies any other terror groups – even if they
have participated in attacks against the US – and indeed, in perceiving
them as potential allies, Obama has failed to defend against them.
Indeed, by wooing them as future allies, Obama has empowered forces as
committed as al-Qaida to defeating the US.
Again, it is not at all apparent that the Times realized
what it was doing. But from Israel to Egypt, to Iran to Libya to
Lebanon, it is absolutely clear that Obama and his colleagues continue
to implement the same dangerous, destructive agenda that defeated the US
in Benghazi and will continue to cause US defeat after US defeat.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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