You don't say?
National Journal’s Ron Fournier on Wednesday argued the Obama Administration always “put politics first” rather than disclosing the truth when dealing with their latest scandals.
Recent emails show that effort to blame an Internet video for the 2012 Benghazi attack was an effort to protect the president's campaign slogan that Osama bin Laden was dead and al Qaeda (as if that's the only jihadi problem) was on the run.
Tip to Instapundit.
As horrible as that motivation is, I've always been more interested in why those Americans under attack were left to fight on their own.
I did not and do not buy the notion that we could not have sent military forces to or over Benghazi to attempt to affect the outcome on the ground.
An an additional failure, the jihadis who attacked our facilities and killed our people have so far gotten away with the assault.
The war isn't over. Our president said he was responsibly ending our wars. But the enemy votes, too, and they pulled the lever for war. Let's try defeating our enemies rather than informing them we are kind of tired of fighting and asking them if they will go along with that fiction for at least a little while longer.
UPDATE: In testimony today, retired Brigadier General Lovell stated that we should have gone "to the sound of the guns" at Benghazi. He said we could have sent troops to intervene. Not that we could have saved the first two Americans, who were killed too quickly, but to reach the ground in the absence of knowledge about how long the crisis would last.
In retrospect, I think we could have reached the Annex while the fighting was going on. We did not. We wrote off the Americans on the ground and were lucky that they made it out on their own rather than just being killed where they held their ground all on their own.
Before the testimony, this is how his testimony was previewed:
“There are accounts of time, space and capability discussions of the question, could we have gotten there in time to make a difference,” Lovell will testify. “Well, the discussion is not in the ‘could or could not’ in relation to time, space and capability. The point is we should have tried.”
Yes. We should have tried. Many of the specialized ground forces could not have reached the Annex in time. But that's only known in retrospect.
But we should have sent troops and aircraft toward Libya in the absence of knowledge of the outcome and time frame. That's what I've been arguing all along.
And I find it outrageous that we didn't move whatever we had on hand towards Libya in case we could have had an impact on the attack.
The witness's testimony is still going on. I hope the right questions are asked. We shall see.
UPDATE: Thus far, Democrats are doing their job by bringing up irrelevant issues (seriously, the Iraq War--again?) while the Republicans largely ask poor questions or fail to give the general time to answer when they get close to the right question of what could have we done by acting on the old adage of heading for the sound of the guns.
In part this is because many members of Congress are more focused on the political angle of the talking points and how the administration blamed an obscure video for the attack. I still want to know why we didn't move to the sound of the guns.
