Mike L.
{Cross-posted at Geoffff's Joint.}
As of this moment the Benghazi scandal centers around four ugly facts.
1) The Obama administration refused to bolster security at the Benghazi facility despite requests to do so by Ambassador Stevens who was subsequently murdered by Jihadis.
2) The Obama administration failed to come to the aid of Ambassador Stevens and his staff despite the fact that they had all night to do so. This was not an attack that took half an hour or one hour or three. It went on throughout the night and yet the US military was told (by someone) to stand down.
3) The Obama administration then lied to the American people about the source of the attack, claiming that it was due to some internet video concerning the life of Muhammed, and did so for political and electoral reasons. Obama had told Americans that Qaeda was, if not defeated, on the run, and he knew that if the administration admitted that this was a terrorist attack by a Qaeda affiliate, the lie would have been exposed and that would have harmed his bid for reelection.
4) The Obama administration then lied about lying through White House spokesmen, Jay Carney, who insisted that the White House did not force any substantive changes to the CIA talking points which originally sourced the attack to Islamists.
There is a lot to answer for here and what we clearly need is a fair and independent investigation into the matter so that the truth can be more closely apprehended.
It needs to be understood, however, that the root of the scandal is Obama's foreign policy ideology. That's the key. The Obama administration has a policy of bolstering political Islam and partnering with Islamists throughout much of the Middle East, particularly in Egypt. According to Professor Barry Rubin, the reason that the Obama administration bolsters political Islam and partners with Islamists is out of a delusional and ahistorical belief that there are "moderate" Islamists, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and "extremist" Islamists, like Qaeda. The "moderate" Islamists tend not to use violence to bring about the Jihad against Israel and the west, although they tend to support the "extremist" Islamists who are now going so far as to cut the hearts from their victims and eat those hearts before the cameras... as utterly revolting as that might be.
Political Islam (or "radical Islam" or "Islamism") is a rising political movement throughout the Muslim Middle East that is characterized by hatred and a form of theological fascism as defined by Sharia law. As a movement it oppresses women, going so far as to stone them to death for the "crime" of marital infedility. Adherents murder Gay people outright, sometimes hanging them from cranes as we have seen in Iran. Their hatred for Jews - those infamous "children of apes and pigs" - is absolutely legendary bordering on genocidal. And, needless to say, they absolutely loathe the decadent west, particularly that Great Satan, the United States.
Obama's stance toward political Islam, and thus toward Israel, is grounded in a number of fundamental misunderstandings. The first misunderstanding is in the nature of political Islam, itself. Political Islam as we know it today derives from the efforts of the Muslim Brotherhood going back to the late 1920s in Cairo. The movement was always fascistic, is still fascistic, and, in fact, sided with the Nazis during World War II. Either Barack Obama knew this or he did not know this. If he did not know this then the man is not competent to make decisions regarding American foreign policy. If he did know this then his behavior borders on treasonous.
Barack Obama thought that he could partner with the Islamists and help moderate them. This is false. There is no way that any American administration can moderate a theological and revolutionary fascist movement under the umbrella of Islam because the movement, itself, opposes the west. They may for practical reasons cooperate with the west and hold elections, but their primary ideology is that of the Caliphate. They will never stand with the west because their entire reason to be is in opposition to western interests. Nonetheless, Barack Obama sought to court political Islam and thereby helped usher the Muslim Brotherhood into power in Egypt, scrubbed any reference to Islam from the internal administration conversation around terrorism, and hoped to show good faith to the new Libyan government by allowing Jihadis to provide security to the American diplomatic team in Benghazi.
And this is why Ambassador Stevens and his people are now dead.
There are those on the hard right of the American political scene who think that Barack Obama is a crypto-Muslim and that this explains his eggregious behavior. There are those on the hard right who think that Barack Obama is a crypto-Islamist and that he actually favors the rise of political Islam as a good in itself. I disagree. What's clear is that Barack Obama is not nearly so intelligent as they kept telling us that he is. Obama seems to have thought that he could somehow work with and moderate the movement. He thought that supporting radical Islam in the Middle East, or the Brotherhood in Egypt, would promote American interests if he could get them to moderate their positions.
I have to say, though, that it takes a special type of stupidity to think that helping your enemies, while subverting your friends, can possibly be in the interests of the American people or our allies; a little fact that Barack Obama unwittingly taught Ambassador Stevens the hard way.
My suspicion is that Obama and his people are beginning to awaken to this reality, but it is far, far too late and there is little that they can do at this point to change course, anyway. Barack Obama made a crucial and fundamental miscalculation at the beginning of his tenure and he will never admit what a profound mistake it was to support political Islam in that part of the world. He cannot admit it because it would be tantamount to acknowledging responsibility for failure, which he will never do. He won't do it and his supporters won't do it, even if they recognize it, which itself is rather doubtful.
