So Many Have Been So Wrong about Libya

      If only we could say it was just Right wing hacks that have gotten it wrong. Yet we also have alleged liberals like Jon Stewart going after the President, lecturing him about how the Libyan attacks "weren't optimal"-as if he ever said they were.

      Jason Linkins and Elysee Siegel at Huffington Post play the usual game of false equivalence and "both sides do it" by claiming that both the President and Romney have played semantic word games about rather than answer what they deem to be the "serious questions" that demand answers over Libya. Here's how they frame it:

       "Here, of course, is where we get to the part where Romney did concede some points. Obama, we'd wager, baited the hook for Romney -- pointedly bringing up what he said in Rose Garden because he knew Romney would be unable to resist countering on the matter. All the while, Obama knew that he had the goods on this (Dave Weigel has the complete exegesis of what words Obama used when) and could spring this trap. "Please proceed, Governor," said Obama, knowing that you never interrupt your opponent as they are about to make a mistake.:

       "Romney, clearly, should have not been suckered into this pseudo-debate over semantics. There are any number of more material things to discuss about the consulate attacks and the Libyan intervention in general. So why did he naturally ease into what turned out to be a losing battle over what was said in the Rose Garden? Erik Wemple offers a compelling argument that Romney's response may have been too informed by the right-wing media, which have gone overboard on some of the more picayune matters to be discussed in the overall world of the Libyan intervention."

      "But the weird emphasis on "magic words" and superficial semantics has become a continual reference point in the right vs. left battle over foreign policy and war-making. Romney didn't need much prompting from Fox News -- he's internalized the war over words himself with the "No Apology" argument he's advanced throughout the campaign."

      http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/libya-debate-semantics-speculatron_n_1989636.html

       Romney had been making this same semantical point for weeks so he was hardly suckered into it. For all that I question the central premise here, which is that Romney has a substantive critique of Libya that got sidetracked by the wrong choice of words. This is actually the GOP argument as well, incidentally. They argued that Romney was "mostly right' but that he was wrong on some small detail-a small detail that he had belabored endlessly.

     This is what they think is the right way to go in Monday's debate, which, of course, will be 90 minutes on foreign policy.

     "We would like this query to be put to Romney, "The nation is obviously tremendously concerned with the deaths of our diplomats in Benghazi, but knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently?" We're generally curious about how Romney thinks about the matter. Would his answer start with how we would respond after an attack? Would he talk about what he would have done to prevent the attack? Would he discuss whether he would have intervened in Libya in the first place? Does his foreign policy have an entirely different set of holistic strategies that could prevent these sorts of failed-state meltdowns in the first place? And then we'd ask Obama, "Do you regret not doing more of what Romney suggested should be done?" and we'd see how Obama discussed the matter."

     This line of question puts it on Romney's terms-'Mr. President why didn't you do what Romney says you should have'-when the reality is that Romney has peddled a lot of disinformation into the public discourse in his zeal to make it a political issue. Romney's whole ideology that this attack had nothing to do with the anti-Islam film and that it was elaborately planned in advance has been dealt a bad blow today with the release of the CIA's internal "talking points." It's not clear why so many are insisting that the Obama team did a bad job on Libya. In reality none of us have the information to make that claim, and Romney is simply being irresponsible in continuing to politicize this as Christopher Stevens' father and Brian Doherty's mother have both urged him not to do.

     http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/10/cia-reports-on-libya-backs-up-susan-rice.html

     Meanwhile, with all the rank speculation about some nefarious thing done by the Obama Administration, it's actually the Republican's investigation in Congress that may have really hurt the CIA's actions, notably endangering many Libyan civilians mentioned in the dossiers of sensitive information Issa has released.

     http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/20/john-kerry-darrell-issa-_n_1992826.html?ref=topbar

     What the President should do is point to the admonishments of Barbara Doherty and Jan Stevens and then point out the memo by the CIA. In truth Libya should not become a political prop as we honestly just don't know enough yet:

      "The Benghazi flap is the sort of situation that intelligence officers dread: when politicians are demanding hard “yes” or “no” answers but evidence is fragmentary and conflicting. The political debate has focused on whether the attack was spontaneous or planned, but the official said there’s evidence of both, and that different attackers may have had different motives. There’s no dispute, however, that it was “an act of terror,” as Obama described it the next day."

       http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2012/10/cia-reports-on-libya-backs-up-susan-rice.html