By turns emotional and fierce, Clinton choked up as she spoke of comforting the victims' families and grew angry when a Republican senator accused the Obama administration of misleading the country over whether the Benghazi incident stemmed from a protest.
"With all due respect, the fact is that we had four dead Americans," Clinton shot back as she testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, an appearance delayed more than a month because of her ill health.
"Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night who decided they'd go kill some Americans? What difference, at this point, does it make?" she said, making chopping motions with her hands for emphasis.
Hillary Clinton is married to Bill Clinton. I'm sure he wrung the tears out of Hillary long ago. And the rest was performance art, too, with Oscars for best supporting roles to the Congressional Democrats who spent their time praising our Secretary of State as if this was her going away party, rather than an inquiry. If we want to prevent such attacks again, we should know what happened. This travesty did not help achieve that.
The immediate question is why the administration blamed a video--and then made sure that video maker was jailed--rather than confronting the fact that al Qaeda is not defeated and jihadis want to kill us. In Spain, a far briefer mishandling of the March 11, 2004 Madrid bombings brought down a government that incorrectly blamed Basque separatists rather than al Qaeda. Pity the Spanish prime minister didn't insist it didn't matter who did it.
In addition to simply wanting to know the details of what appears to be a heroic rescue mission to the consulate and defense of the annex, we need answers to four decision points that this administration failed to pass:
We had four decision points in this crisis: the pre-attack decisions to defend our diplomatic outposts (or evacuate them if we couldn't defend them) and prepare forces to respond to threats to those outposts that exceed local defense capabilities; the decision to send forces to defend the consulate; the decision to send forces to defend the annex; and the decision to respond to the attacks.
On the first, we clearly failed. And blaming funding levels is not the answer. If the funding was inadequate, why was the consulate and ambassador there? If he and his staff had to be there, just what was a higher priority for funding by the State Department? Did the State Department believe that rot about al Qaeda being defeated, and so put a higher priority on new drapes for the Paris embassy rather than security at forward diplomatic outposts? This speaks to the failure of the administration to really believe we are at war. We must learn from this mistake, and simply demanding a larger budget is not the answer.
On the second, there was clearly insufficient time to defend the consulate once shooting started. I tend to give the administration a pass on the question of why our military wasn't dispatched. At least the State Department rapidly sent their para-military security force quickly. And no, we can't simply keep military assets on-call in case of a diplomatic emergency, as our military leaders protested.
The third is the biggest issue. We did have time to send forces to the annex. It could have been a show of force by high speed aircraft. That might have scared the jihadis--well aware of the power of our smart bombs--and gotten them to back off. Or we might have found we could use smart bombs. Even though our military shouldn't keep forces on-call, why couldn't we have scrounged up a company or even just a platoon of infantry or military police (a splendid light infantry force) from all our forces in Europe? Why wasn't such a force dispatched within a few hours just in case? With preparations for a bigger force put in motion to reinforce them if needed?
After all, we didn't know that the consulate staff was a complete goner for a bit, and we certainly didn't know the outcome of the annex fight. Is the fact that we didn't try to send military forces an indication that somebody in Washington, D.C. simply wrote off the couple dozen or so people at the annex? Did we get lucky that the small security force--including two who died holding out--was able to hold their ground and get the staff out when the sun rose? Could we be talking about 20 or 30 dead and asking what's the difference about how they died?
Finally, why haven't we retaliated? We had ready-made al Qaeda targets in northern Mali to hit. We knew early on that there were links between the Benghazi attackers and the Mali-based al Qaeda. Has a law enforcement mentality infected the administration so deeply that they don't want to do anything but slap cuffs on those who directly participated?
Did Franklin Roosevelt respond to Pearl Harbor by refusing to fight anyone but the pilots who dropped ordnance on our Pacific Fleet that Sunday morning?
We could have torn up the jihadis in northern Mali and nobody would have blamed us. We could have struck the jihadis. Remember, French air strikes in northern Mali were enabled by our intelligence reports that we shared with the French.
Maybe the written questions that Congress submitted to Secretary of State Clinton will get some answers. But my hopes aren't high. I think they--the jihadis and the administration--got away with their actions that September 11, 2012 day.
UPDATE: Thanks to Mad Minerva for the link. She reminds us that we did retaliate for the Benghazi assault--if you count the film maker sitting in jail, coincidentally arrested for unrelated charges once it was known the powers that be wanted him put away.
And the British remind us what the difference is about what happened in Benghazi:
Britain's Foreign Office urged U.K. nationals to immediately leave the eastern Libyan city of Benghazi in response to an imminent threat against Westerners.
Yeah, at this point, what's the diff? Benghazi is ancient history.
And who cares if Clinton stood by her man this time (tip to Instapundit), underbussing herself to shield the administration that wanted to responsibly end our wars regardless of the enemies' intention to kill us? One might call it a vast Islamist-wing conspiracy, no?
No word if President Obama got any cookies or tea out of the deal.
UPDATE: From one of the links Mad Minerva provides:
Clinton's statement may set a new standard for politically motivated evasions of basic truth and decency. Seriously: What difference does it make? Just for low-stakes starters, there's a guy in California who was put in jail basically because the Obama administration said his stupid, irrelevant video trailer for "The Innocence of Muslims" was to blame for anti-Americanism in Libya and beyond. President Obama went to the United Nations and bitch-slapped free expression in front of a global audience on the premise that "Innocence" was the cause of the attack on Benghazi. Our own U.N. ambassador, Susan Rice, took to the talk shows to peddle a line that was either wilfully misleading or simply totally wrong (Rice was the admin's point person in early appearances about Benghazi partly because, as Clinton explained yesterday, she doesn't like doing Sunday morning shows!).
Contra Clinton, it makes a great deal of difference because understanding how this all happened is the first step to making sure it doesn't happen over and over and over again.
But because only Republicans seem to care, our press rallies around their flag and belittles the whole affair.
