So, when our Benghazi consulate was assaulted on September 11th, the Obama administration assumed that the attack was inspired by an obscure Internet video.
Worse from their point of view, they assumed that none of the protesters were inspired by the well-publicized Cairo Outreach speech to the Islamic world to consider a peaceful response to the video.
UPDATE: This seems appropriate:
A month after the murder of four American officials in Libya on Sept. 11, congressional testimony and leaked government cables have revealed that some U.S. officials immediately recognized that terrorists had planned the attack. So why did the Obama administration's top policy makers—including the president himself—persist in claiming that the catastrophe was a spontaneous outburst of rage against an anti-Islam video posted on YouTube by an American provocateur?
Many critics smell cynical politics. The president, after all, has an electoral interest in denying that terrorism remains a serious problem. ...
But there's a bigger problem here than cynicism. It is that the administration's first response—to blame an American video, not Islamist terrorists—reflected strategic misjudgments. First is the refusal to accept that the terrorism threat is part of a larger problem of Islamist extremism. And second is the belief that terrorism is spawned not by religious fanaticism but by grievances about social, economic and other problems for which America bears fault.
President Carter had his eyes opened to the Soviet threat by their invasion of Afghanistan. It didn't matter much, since President Carter had little time left in his tenure to act on that lesson.
President Obama has yet to demonstrate that he recognizes his error fully rather than seeing it as a campaign headache. But whether he does or doesn't recognize the threat, it might not matter much.
