I have been reluctant to simply criticize the mass closings. I don't know what is going on behind the scenes to justify the closings. My major complaint has been that our failure to defend the Benghazi outpost and then our failure to strike back at those responsible makes another attack on a diplomatic facility to politically damaging to risk.
If we'd won the Battle of Benghazi or at least made some solid craters at jihadi locations, we could probably afford to quietly defend our posts and hope to take advantage of intelligence to kill or capture more jihadis rather than warn them off (and warn them off about their communications methods).
The breadth of the closings either indicated a truly major plot or indicated we really had no clue about what the threat is. The focus on Yemen (drone strikes, evacuating Americans, Marines off-shore) seems to indicate the usual suspects are involved and the threat really isn't so broad.
And there's been no news following up on reports of gunfire involving apparent American special operations forces or CIA para-militaries in Derna, Libya.
And if a real threat, why did our president dash off to do Jay Leno rather than provide a photo-op of the president looking over the shoulders of military personnel looking at computer screens during actual opeations to defeat the threat?
So when experts start wondering if this is all just "crazy pants" (tip to Instapundit), I have to pay attention:
"It’s crazy pants – you can quote me,” said Will McCants, a former State Department adviser on counterterrorism who this month joins the Brookings Saban Center as the director of its project on U.S. relations with the Islamic world.
“We just showed our hand, so now they’re obviously going to change their position on when and where” to attack, said Nada Bakos, a former CIA analyst who was part of the team that hunted Osama bin Laden for years.
“It’s not completely random, but most people are, like, ‘Whaaat?’ ” said Aaron Zelin, who researches militants for the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and blogs about them at Jihadology.net
“I’m not going to argue that it’s not willy-nilly, but it’s hard for me to come down too critical because I simply don’t know their reasoning,” said Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a counterterrorism specialist at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a Washington research institute.
What is going on? Is there a jihadi threat to our embassies or a jihadi threat to presidential approval ratings?
