As Republican House members grilled State Department officials over the last month’s lethal attacks on U.S. facilities and personnel in Benghazi, Gen. Michael Hayden, George W. Bush’s former CIA director (2006 to 2009) and now a Romney campaign advisor, suggested in a column published on the CNN website that realism [...]]]> via Lobe Log

As Republican House members grilled State Department officials over the last month’s lethal attacks on U.S. facilities and personnel in Benghazi, Gen. Michael Hayden, George W. Bush’s former CIA director (2006 to 2009) and now a Romney campaign advisor, suggested in a column published on the CNN website that realism should govern U.S. actions in the Middle East, as opposed to “wishful thinking:”

In any event, given the administration’s existing narrative about its success against al Qaeda and the inherent attractiveness of the spontaneous attack plotline (a spontaneous attack would be neither predictable nor preventable and therefore less likely to invite blame for a lack of sufficient security), there were likely strong instincts in the White House to accept and publicize the original director of national intelligence assessment regardless of confidence levels or competing analysis.

Strong instincts, but not necessarily good instincts.

…. Even more importantly, if wishful thinking can sometimes create political problems, it could take a far more important toll on the development and implementation of actual policy. The decision to intervene in Libya, though wrapped in a U.N. Security Council resolution to protect innocent life, was also a decision to overthrow the Libyan government, and U.S./NATO airstrikes continued until that goal was achieved.

With that “victory,” Libya was predictably thrown into chaos: no central government, no institutions of civil society, fractious armed militias, a budding jihadist movement in the east, lingering regionalism and tribalism elsewhere. Predictable consequences were not confined to Libya. Awash with weapons and fleeing mercenaries, northern Mali was broken off from the center and became a haven for a strengthening al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb.

…. Although we were less immediately responsible for the overthrow of regimes in Egypt, Tunisia and Yemen, we will be no less affected by the outcome in those states. The same will hold true for Syria when the day of reckoning comes for Bashar al-Assad’s regime. What level of effort is the United States prepared to exert?

We shouldn’t fool ourselves. Our influence will often be far from decisive. But neither will it be trivial.

And surely, in a time of global challenges and fiscal pressures, we will have to pick our investments and “interventions” carefully.

But that will require a realistic rather than a wishful appreciation of events.

Over the past year the administration has repeatedly emphasized that “the tide of war is receding” and that “it’s time to do some nation-building here at home.” Many have read this as advertising an American retrenchment from commitments abroad.

Ahead of tonight’s first 2012 presidential debate, new questions are being raised about the Obama Administration’s policies on counterterrorism abroad — one of the Administration’s main foreign policy record talking points — in light of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi Libya that killed four Americans.

Darrell Issa (R-CA) [...]]]> via Lobe Log

Ahead of tonight’s first 2012 presidential debate, new questions are being raised about the Obama Administration’s policies on counterterrorism abroad — one of the Administration’s main foreign policy record talking points — in light of the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi Libya that killed four Americans.

Darrell Issa (R-CA) has called for Secretary of State Clinton to testify at a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on how the State Department weighed two bomb attacks on the consulate in the preceding months in light of increased security concerns over US assets in Libya. Republicans are also questioning whether the Administration maintained for several days that the attacks were the result of anti-American riots over a film in order to deflect blame for not seeing a pre-planned attack coming. But according to The Daily Beast/Newsweek, the CIA informed top officials in a briefing three days after the attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens — when UN Ambassador Susan Rice was asserting that the attacks were the result of the riots — that “the events were spontaneous.”

That briefing, the report notes, has since been called into question. The Associated Press reports that “[w]ithin hours of last month’s attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, President Barack Obama’s administration received about a dozen intelligence reports suggesting militants connected to al Qaeda were involved,” yet the official messaging remained contradictory. According to the LA Times, the US reportedly began tracking suspected militants in Libya by drone and wire-intercepts in the aftermath of the attack, suggesting that there were concerns in advance over their intentions towards the consulate.

The Associated Press also reports that questions over the attacks — which became a flashpoint in this presidential campaign raised by Republicans are likely to become a venue for criticizing the Administration’s Mideast policies. Politico reports that within the Romney campaign, there is division among his advisors over whether or not to shift some focus from the economy over onto the Benghazi attacks, with campaign manager Stuart Stevens against making such a shift, likely due to the strong backlash against Romney’s earlier comments that were made without knowledge of the four Americans killed in Libya.

But given the internal rifts within the campaign over Stevens’s leadership style, it’s not certain that foreign policy pundits have lost the battle, as they continue to assail Obama on Libya alongside Congressional Republicans demanding an investigation into what intelligence warnings the State Department may have had ahead of September 11, 2012 but failed to act on. The Christian Science Monitor

 suggested that Republicans will be “Jimmy Carterizing Obama” in spite of such internal debate, as those close to the campaign — such as former UN Ambassador and Romney advisor John Bolton — have pulled no punches in their TV appearances.

Of all the prominent Republican critics, only Senator John McCain (R-AZ) — while still demanding the Administration clarify its contradictory remarks about the attacks — has offered a qualified defense of the US’s overall record of intervention Libya, criticizing his interviewers on Fox News last month for suggesting that Libyans generally supported the attackers. In fact, tens of thousands of Benghazi residents demonstrated against Islamist militias soon after the attacks and the government launched a crackdown on suspects and loose weapons in the city.

McCain has also charged the Administration is retreating from the region, but the US intelligence and military presence is set to increase in Libya in the coming weeks now that the intelligence community has fingered several pre-existing Islamist organizations in “chatter” over the attacks.

The personal and controversial nature of much of the criticism over what has been one of the Administration’s most concrete achievements in the Middle East since 2008 seems to be wearing patience thin in the White House.

The Administration’s growing anger over the criticism being aired against it was best exemplified in an expletive-filled exchange between one of Secretary of State Clinton’s top aides and journalist Max Hastings this week. Hastings defended CNN’s controversial use of the late ambassador’s recovered diary in its Libyan reporting last month. The Administration is upset with CNN’s handling of the diary partly because the network tried to keep its use of his diary quiet. But the diary is also embarrassing from a policy standpoint because in it, CNN says the late ambassador was concerned the consulate was being targeted by terrorists.

Unnamed officials now concede that the US had (general) concerns about targeting in the months prior to the attack, such that special forces teams were dispatched to Libya and other Muslim countries to set up rapid-response counterterrorism centers. According to the AP report that quoted these officials, the center in Libya was too new to have offered sufficient advance warning.

There may be further Beltway discussion of Obama’s Middle East record based on a report in the Wall Street Journal detailing how Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood President has been cutting deals with Islamist groups to release batches of their members imprisoned by Hosni Mubarak. The majority of these men — who were tortured by Mubarak’s security services for years — are thought to be political prisoners now too old and bruised to pose any security threats. But several of those freed, the Journal reports, are still active as militant organizers. One of those released was Muhammad Jamal Abu Ahmad, an Egyptian national who is believed to be the main point-man for an al Qaeda core leadership seeking to (re)assert it’s presence in the Maghreb.

Ahmad is reportedly seeking to step up operations in Libya under his own aegis against Libyan and American targets.

The death of Muammar Qaddafi offers a milestone in the Libyan revolution as the Libyan Transitional National Council must move on to the difficult task of holding national elections and NATO forces begin to wind down operations. But the Libyan and NATO victory doesn’t seem to be [...]]]> Reposted by arrangement with Think Progress

The death of Muammar Qaddafi offers a milestone in the Libyan revolution as the Libyan Transitional National Council must move on to the difficult task of holding national elections and NATO forces begin to wind down operations. But the Libyan and NATO victory doesn’t seem to be enough for congressional hawks who have long mocked the White House’s so-called “leading from behind” Libya strategy.

While U.S. participation in a successful NATO and regional coalition operation in Libya without putting American lives in danger would seem like an overall victory, Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) all took to the airwaves to grudgingly admit that while the White House’s strategy appears to have worked, their untested plans for more U.S. airpower and a unilateral strategy in which U.S. commanders would control the air campaign, would have resulted in fewer Libyan deaths.

Mccain told the Today Show:

The fact is that we could have ended this conflict a lot earlier if we had used the full weight of U.S. air power instead of leading from behind and we wouldn’t have the 30,000 who are wounded and hundreds, if not thousands, who are killed.

Rubio told Fox News:

We have a lot of people dead and a lot of young men who, instead of entering the workforce and helping rebuild Libya, have to go into rehab and recovery for their war wounds. A lot of this could have been avoided had we gotten involved early and decisively.

And Graham told Fox News:

If we could have kept American air power in the fight it would have been over quicker. Sixty-thousand Libyans have been wounded, 3,000 maimed, 25,000 killed.

Watch a compilation of their comments:

Of course, a large-scale bombing campaign, as they seem to be suggesting, would have taken a massive humanitarian toll as well. Perhaps more importantly, a U.S. driven campaign, as opposed to the role the U.S. and its allies played in offering air support for Libyan rebel forces, would have made Qaddafi’s defeat yet another U.S. led overthrow of an Arab leader instead of a popular revolt driven by Libyan rebel forces. While Rubio, McCain and Graham might have wanted to apply an Iraq-style strategy of unilateral U.S. military action, their assertions that lives would have been saved appears to be nothing more than politically motivated speculation.