The “Four Sisters” and Libya
“Don’t you think it was neat that strong women were able to get the President to stop the slaughter of innocent people in Libya?”
“Which women?”
“Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, Samantha Power and Madeline Albright.”
“Oh. What slaughter?”
“Well, there wasn’t any actual slaughter, but there would have been.”
“I see. Why?”
“Well, the Libyan army was moving against the rebels in the east, and they would have slaughtered the rebels.”
“Did the rebels have weapons?”
“Of course, silly. But not big weapons like the army has.”
“Were the rebels shooting at the army?”
“Of course. That’s what rebels do.”
“So, a military force was moving to quell an armed insurrection inside its own borders before things got too far out of hand, and maybe some people would have been killed in the process. Who are the rebels?”
“No one really knows who they are. They are just citizens of Libya. They are freedom fighters, and they deserved to be saved.”
“And how did the President stop a country from restoring order inside its own borders?”
“Well, he sent lots of American jet bombers and missiles and drones to attack the army on the ground and the government in the capital and blow them up.”
“I see. Had the government of Libya threatened America?”
“No. But they did bad things a long time ago.”
“Did we work out our differences with their government for the bad things long ago?”
“Sort of. They gave us all their nuclear weapons, turned over the men responsible for blowing up a civilian airliner a quarter of a century ago, and paid the families of the victims millions of dollars. Then we formally established diplomatic relations with each other.”
“Did you know that they were also giving us a lot of help with the war on terrorism?”
“No. I didn’t know that.”
“Boy, we sure did teach the world something about the wisdom of nuclear disarmament, didn’t we? Give us your nukes so we can bomb you safely. I bet that lesson taught Iran and North Korea a lot. Wow. So, we were friends.”
“Sort of.”
“Did the government of Libya threaten anyone else, like our allies or American citizens?”
“No. But they were going to do bad things against their own people.”
“Maybe. Did the US Congress debate the situation beforehand and vote its approval?”
“No. There wasn’t enough time for that. But they will.”
“When?”
“Probably after it’s all over.”
“When one country bombs another country, isn’t that an act of war?”
“Of course it is. But I did hear someone say that it isn’t really war if you don’t send soldiers, too.”
“Oh. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Maybe we should go back and forgive Japan for attacking Pearl Harbor because maybe it wasn’t really war. Still, doesn’t the Constitution require that wars first be declared by representatives of the American people in the US Congress?”
“I guess.”
“So, because there wasn’t enough time and these four women were smarter than Congress and the American people, they just got the bombs falling as fast as possible?”
“Right.”
“Oh. I guess we can forget about the Constitution when we have such smart women
around. Did any rebels get slaughtered?”
“Maybe a few, but not many. That’s the great thing! That’s what makes our women so neat!”
“I see. And how many of the Libyan government people did our bombers and missiles kill?”
“I don’t know. Thousands. Who cares?”
“I see. It’s not ok for the Libyan government to put down an armed insurrection in which some innocent people might have been killed, but it is ok for us to kill even many times more Libyans – in order to avoid unnecessary bloodshed. Got it. Is there anything else?”
“No.”
“So, in order to avoid something we were afraid might happen, we staged a massive unprovoked military attack against a sovereign state with which we had formal diplomatic relations while that government was preparing to restore order inside its own borders. And the President did it without the approval required by the Constitution. Did it work?”
“Well, not yet. But our bombers are still dropping bombs and missiles on Libya’s military and government.”
“So, to avoid what might have become a slaughter, we have been doing our own slaughtering. Do we know who and what the rebels represent besides “freedom”?”
“Not yet. They’re just people.”
“How are things going in the other wars?”
“What other wars?
“The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, where over 6,000 of our soldiers have already died.”
“Oh, those wars. I don’t know. I haven’t heard much about them recently.”
“Tell me again why we attacked Afghanistan.”
“You know, silly. Because they attacked us on 9/11.”
“How did they attack us?
“They flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and killed lots of people.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Because they were angry at us for the way we had been treating them unfairly.”
“Was that true?”
“No. But they believed it was true.”
“Did we know they were going to attack us?”
“Of course not, silly.”
“So, we were the victim of an unprovoked surprise attack inside our borders from an enemy against whom we were not at war. What happened after that?”
“Well, we sent our military to attack the bad guys in Afghanistan.”
“Why?”
“Because they had attacked us!”
“Did Congress approve of our retaliation?”
“Of course.”
“So, we retaliated for an unprovoked attack on us by attacking them. Does the Libyan government now get to do the same against us?”
“Don’t be silly. Of course not. We’re the Good Guys. And besides, no one would attack us, because we’re too strong.”
“But we were attacked, right?”
“I guess.”
“So it really all boils down to us being the biggest bully on the block who gets to play by our own rules, rules that don’t apply to others. Got it. How are the rebels doing with all that bombing and missiles and killing against the Libyan government?”
“Well, there seems to be a sort of stalemate. A month later we are still dropping bombs and blowing up the Libyan military and killing people, but there seems to be a sort of stalemate between the rebels and the government.”
“Why?”
“It seems the rebels are not so well organized, don’t seem to know about military stuff, don’t seem to have any effective leadership, and sometimes seem to be fighting each other. You know, they don’t know the things that the American Army knows.”
“It’s been a month now. Do we know who the leaders are? Do we know what the rebels will do if they win?”
“Not yet.”
“Where are the rebels getting all their weapons?”
“They’re taking some of them away from the army people we kill, and they’re getting a lot more from the black market.”
“So what next?”
“I think we need to send in some American soldiers to train the rebels and help them win.”
“But we don’t even know who they are, who their leaders are, what they want, or what they intend to do. How long do you think it will take for our soldiers to do these things?”
“I don’t know.”
“How many of our soldiers do you think will be needed?”
“I don’t know. Lots.”
“How many of our soldiers do you think will die trying to help the rebels win?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think your four women know the answers to these things?”
“I don’t think so. They don’t know about military stuff.”
“So, maybe we should send the four women in to Libya and check out the situation and come back and tell us all what’s going on, who’s in charge, and what needs to be done.”
“Don’t be silly. That’s not their job.”
“I see. The hard stuff is for “someone else”. So, America is now in three wars, and many people are dying, and the women responsible for the latest war don’t know what to do. Do you think that’s a good situation?”
“Not really.”
“I hear there are now armed insurrections in five other Arab-Muslim countries, and people are dying in them, too. Are we going to send our military to all of them, too?”
“No one has suggested that.”
“I see. Why not?”
“Well, our military is pretty busy already.”
“Do you think the people in those other five countries care that our military is busy bombing some other government, but not theirs?”
“I suppose they do.”
“What would you be thinking if you were a rebel in one of those other countries?”
“I guess I would be pretty angry that the Americans can bomb one country but not mine.”
“Would you be angry enough to try to send bombs to America?”
“Maybe.”
“And where are all those rebels in other countries getting all their weapons?”
“Well, I heard that a lot of weapons left lying around after our bombings in Libya is beginning to move to those other countries, as well as to all sorts of different rebel groups inside Libya.”
“Do you think that’s a good thing to be happening?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t thought much about it.”
“Do you think your four women considered all these things before getting the President to send the US military to attack Libya?”
“I don’t think so. They were just afraid some people might die.”
“I see. And what if some of our soldiers die trying to fix the mess?”
“Oh, that would be bad.”
“I see. How do you think this thing in Libya will end?”
“I don’t know. Right now it looks like there will be two parts of one country at war with each other for a long time until one side wins.”
“And more people will die?”
“I guess so.”
“I see. And what happens when all the fighting and dying is all over?”
“What do you mean?”
“When the current government has been destroyed. Who controls all the guns and other weapons lying around? Who can stop all the fighting among the various groups? When one faction finally kills off all the opposition? What is to keep whoever comes out on top from becoming any worse than what was destroyed?
“Gee. I hadn’t thought about that. Soldiers maybe?”
“What soldiers?”
“Why, our soldiers, I guess.”
“I see.”
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“Half the harm done in this world is due to people who want to feel important.” – T.S. Eliot
(See Footnote #1.)
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(See “Getting Gadhafi“, “Smiling Faces And Purple Fingers – And Egypt“, and “Why Benghazi Is Important“, posted separately.)
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(Note: Anyone wishing to use this dialogue in a video, please send me a brief e-mail and include an address to a sample of your work. I give extra points for intelligence and maturity.)
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Note that the above was written and posted shortly after the bombing campaign began – a full 18 months before the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi. Everything was always entirely predictable even before the bombing campaign began – by anyone who actually understood what they were doing.
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Footnote #1. Pan Am Flight 103. Because of the very vocal and persistent organized lobbying by the surviving members of an airliner that was bought down over Lockerbie Scotland, there has long been a strong emotional undercurrent in certain government quarters about getting “even” with those behind that bombing. However, there has also been a strong rumor floating around certain other circles for years that the bomb was planted on board Pan Am Flight 103 in 1988 on the orders of the Iranian regime under Ayatollah Khomeini, not Gaddafi of Libya, and that this was immediately suspected and then known by British and American intelligence within two years after the plane went down. The rumor is that the Pan Am flight was pay-back for the US Navy accidentally shooting down an Iranian airliner over the Mediterranean Sea earlier in 1988. However, in 1990 both the US and UK were faced with Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and decided that it was best not to muddy that situation by further alienating both Iran and Syria at that time. So, as the story goes, the US framed a Libyan airline official to pacify surviving family members of Flight 103, and to secure the support of Syria in the effort to eject Iraq from Kuwait, and this charade was carried forward all the way through Gaddafi eventually paying each Flight 103 family a sum of $10 million. In 2014, two years after the death of the man convicted of the bombing and the death of Gaddafi, a former Iranian intelligence officer confirmed the direct Iranian involvement. (Source of last sentence: Gwynne Dyer, Canadian journalist and historian.) I suspect that Scottish officials learned of the scheme, and that this figured prominently in their decision to release the convicted man on humanitarian illness grounds and allow him to be returned to Libya.
Footnote #2: ‘Human Rights’ and ‘Responsibility To Protect’. Since the end of the “Cold” War, Madeline Albright has been aggressively advancing a theory of using military force under a “Responsibility To Protect” banner, which itself is the action arm of the “Human Rights” mantra. Human “rights” are whatever emotional women decide they are, and, as with all rights claimed by American women, the rights come without responsibilities, much less accountability, for one’s own choices, one’s own behavior. Under this theory, if emotional women spot some perceived injustice in the world, they can engineer the use of the US military to go forth and correct that perceived injustice. It’s essentially a quick and easy way to force “someone else” to go die for your emotional cause of the moment because, of course, you are too “special” to do it yourself. A critical aspect of this ideology is the creation and fanning of “great urgency” among huge herds of emotional nitwits. It’s that “emergency” part that enables the speedy use of the US military in deadly war without bothering with that irritating US Constitutional requirement to have the matter thoroughly examined, debated, decided and declared through due deliberation of the people’s elected representatives in Congress.
This “exigency” practice grew out of minor Constitutional adjustments legislated by Congress during the height of the “Cold” War which enabled a President to very quickly commit the US military to counter major threats to the continued existence of the United States nation, such as that clearly presented by the imminent attack of hundreds of intercontinental ballistic missiles each armed with individually-targeted multiple nuclear bombs. When this imminent existential threat to the nation faded with the end of the “Cold” War, women like Albright saw an opportunity to continue the short-cuts for self-serving political objectives, beginning with the first post-“Cold” War administration of President Clinton during the 1990s. The “great emergency” for the nation’s survival justification devolved into a “great emergency” for human rights justification. The rationale used was no longer logic, but emotion. It continued the enormously inflated power of the office of the President, but for purposes that enabled, not powerful US military protection of the nation and her critical allies (“Leader Of The Free World”) against real and powerful foreign military aggression, but enforcer of “international human rights law” wherever that was expedient (“World Cop Enforcer”) as determined by herd emotion.
The fact that the US military emerged from the “Cold” War as a single unchallenged military super-power thus facilitated the use of that military for purposes never envisioned under the US Constitution – which was first and foremost concerned with limiting the power of a single head-of-state, with ensuring that any head-of-state could not become a dictator operating without checks and balances. The first effect of a single super-power military was to obviate the need for its owners to think. It enabled them to ignore the “law of unintended consequences”. We could now just blunder in, with little or no adult consideration of what comes next, of the unpredictability of outcomes, or of who or what else is impacted by our actions, either today or generations from now. If you are the only one with a military super-power, you don’t have to worry about making mistakes, about faulty thinking, because you can always use that military to fix any mistakes made. Or so the “thinking” goes. Eventually you realize that any nit-wit on any street corner can become President and order the US military to do whatever that person wants done anywhere in the world, and almost always for self-serving domestic political objectives. You get to pick and choose where America’s soldiers die. All you have to do is generate chatter about some “human rights” matter somewhere, fan emotion among huge herds in “social media”, generate additional propaganda and lies, and get a President, viewing those herds as voters, to send the military off to fix it. The voters thus get their vicarious machismo and self-worth pumped up for free. It all has to be done quickly, before those flighty herds move on to other matters and the US Congress starts to think that it should play a role, too. If the US military must remain in place long after the herds have moved on to other momentary interests, then so be it; those military people are, after all, only widgets and spare parts serving “very special me” and “my” emotional wants of the moment. “I have rights! I do NOT have responsibilities! Everyone else has the responsibility for ensuring whatever rights I demand! As queen I can order the military to do whatever I want!” (If you want to get one of these things moving really fast, just focus on some “girls” or “women” somewhere who might somehow be in danger. “Expendable” boys or men getting slaughtered will never garner anyone’s attention; they’re just not “special”.)
Note that now the US doesn’t really need credible military “allies”; all it needs are token “allies” who can be used to convey an “international coalition” flavor as cover for whatever the US military is ordered to do unilaterally. Also note that these emotional ideologues don’t need the US Congress, either (other than to fork over the necessary money after-the-fact); the real work is now done in the UN, where it is perfectly acceptable to lie to other members about your own true intentions – just to get the UN to “approve” your actions and lend it a certain “international respectability”. (You have to be brain-dead to think that most other countries are not happy to give these ideologues any approval they want so as to avoid having to use their own “military forces” to do it.)
Among Madeline Albright’s most devoted disciples are Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power and Susan Rice. Together they are The Four Sisters.
I’ll try to state this as clearly as possible: Now that Libya’s lack of effective governance, especially in eastern Libya near Egypt, has presented a safe-haven for a range of al Qaeda-affiliated groups and “assorted “militias”, the “terrorist” flood will soon spread throughout northern Africa and encompass the entire Sahara – the very thing that Gaddafi was keeping a lid on. Only a bunch of idiots, with zero strategy, and zero consideration for what comes next, would EVER pull the finger out of the dictatorship dyke in northern Africa (Gaddafi) before things in the Mid-East played out as a result of the finger we pulled out of the dictatorship dyke there (Saddam) – and that might come as early as 2040. Opening one Pandora’s Box was not enough, so we had to open a second one, too? Now we will very shortly have TWO uncontrollable “terrorist” floods with which to deal that make matters at least twice as difficult and dangerous – exactly when everyone wants to fire half the few soldiers we have left. And the flood in northern Africa will benefit enormously from the mother lode of Libya’s weapons our really stupid eight month bombing campaign, without US soldiers on the ground, handed to them gratis. The lunatics are running the asylum.
One major objective (Albright) of our going into Libya was also to get the European members of “NATO”, after doing almost nothing in Afghanistan behind the Americans, to take a leading role in a foreign objective. That effort predictably failed when the Europeans, as they always do, suckered the US into spending over 85% of the weapons and money, and then using the whole show simply to inflate their own phony “machismo” in their own eyes. The Europeans then proved themselves totally unwilling even to accept the many tens of thousands of refugees fleeing Libya, much less to go in with the obligatory ground forces needed to control the inevitably resulting chaos after over eight months of bombing. Once again, the US was left holding the “NATO” bag – by our paper tiger “allies”. (Yes, we have sent in a number a secret teams made up of former US military men under contract with the CIA to get some sort of handle on the chaotic situation; of immediate concern is a huge number of shoulder-fired missiles that can be used to bring down planes – both military and civilian.)
17 Sep 2012: Now we even have the murder of the male ambassador, plus the violent deaths of three other brave American men, whom an unqualified and unaccountable Queen Hillary sent into the lawless chaotic zoo she and her three sisters created in Libya. They, naturally, prefer to blame it all on a 3-minute video clip. The four men were killed by elements, totaling 50-100 fighters, of two separate “rebel” groups – Ansar al-Sharia and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. These two groups, along with a third group in that eastern area of Libya near the very porous border with Egypt and its Muslim Brotherhood, are actually quite large, extremist and potent terrorist organizations affiliated with al Qaeda. The three groups, who were indeed opposed to the Gaddafi regime and as such did constitute “rebels”, were significantly assisted by the US bombing of Libya in order to achieve their own objectives. Among those objectives was capturing huge stores of Gaddafi’s military equipment and turning the now unemployed potent foreign mercenary forces Gaddafi had been using to control unruly elements in the region. Those captured war munitions and materiel (which includes at least 10,000 rocket-propelled grenade launchers plus surface-to-air missiles) have now been distributed throughout their own organizations and to other such organizations throughout the northern Africa and Mid-East region, including fundamentalist groups in Syria and in Egypt not associated with the now-decapitated Egyptian military. Rocket-propelled grenades launched from weapons captured from Gadhafi’s military were used to attack the US Consulate in Benghazi and a nearby annex contractor “safe-house”.
Their attack on the US Consulate was a pre-planned military operation, with inside intelligence provided by spies previously inserted in nascent, incompetent and disorganized Libyan “security forces”, and the attack used a small “demonstration” staged to ostensibly protest the video as both pretext and cover. The same pretext has been used throughout the Muslim world as the spark needed for other pre-planned uprisings against the US and the West staged inside their own countries. This coordinated operation, covering a huge portion of the globe, is a consequence of a whole range of perceived slights by the US against al Qaeda and Muslims – including the killing of bin Laden and two follow-on senior leaders, the 11th anniversary of the 9/11/2001 attacks, the remote-controlled killing of innocent Muslims in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, the chest-thumping in Washington over bin Laden’s killing, the publishing of a book about bin Laden’s killing by a member of the US assassination team, etc..
The demonstrations and attacks are meant to show Muslims and everyone else on Earth that the most powerful conventional military machine on the planet is ineffective against the unconventional forces of Islam, and American voters that US leaders had been deceiving them about the “success” of their efforts against the enemy. Since this major coordinated campaign, very similar to the 1968 Tet Offensive in Vietnam, came just prior to the 2012 presidential election in America, it was important that the Obama Administration, and its partners in the US “news” media and in Europe, “spin” things in an entirely different manner, and stick religiously to the previously crafted narrative of a “decimated al Qaeda that is on the run and nearly defeated”. Due to gross incompetence, the truth is entirely the opposite.
A totally destroyed Libya, with extremely limited self-governance and stabilization capability, provided the easiest opportune stage and a whole new nearly lawless playground for al Qaeda, primarily in the eastern half of the country. These groups are now establishing a similar lawless base of operations in neighboring Mali and have shipped huge weapons caches, some via ship, to extremist elements operating against the regime in Syria. The asinine bombing campaign against Libya proved a godsend to extremist groups operating throughout northern Africa and the Mid-East.
While all this was going on, for over seven hours, Washington, including the State Department, the Defense Department, the CIA and the White House, under Obama Administration “leadership”, was provided with real time information from Benghazi via both cable, telephone and overhead drone communications. Just as they had done little to insure it wouldn’t happen, they also failed to take proper action to assist the men trying to defend the consulate, the US ambassador and the CIA “safe house”, after they came under very coordinated military attack.
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(The extremely disjointed, confusing and contradictory response of the Obama Administration following the attack at Benghazi was a rather disorganized political effort to protect as much as possible the role of Clinton – who intends to run for the presidency in 2016 on the basis of her “vast foreign affairs” experience. Literally nothing outweighs domestic politics in America’s conduct of business beyond its shores, and most especially with matters military; the main objective is always to win the votes of those like the young lady conversing above.)
You’d have to be a total moron, or willfully fearful of the truth, NOT to know that the Obama Administration has been lying about every aspect of this shameful event in Benghazi from the very beginning on 9 September 2012, and continues to compound their lies with completely absurd nonsense. Obviously a really enormous number of Americans simply don’t want to know the truth about the negligence and incompetence of their “leaders” – as long as it doesn’t involve “me”, and “someone else” dies. Those directly responsible for this failure and the subsequent sloppy cover-up are Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the President’s Advisor on Human Rights Samantha Power, the US representative at the United Nations Susan Rice, the President’s Advisor on Counterterrorism John Brennan, and President Barack Obama. It’s ALL about not damaging the almighty super-majority women’s vote before election day and women’s sacred mission to protect women icons with their “birthright entitled” claim to the throne – with zero responsibility for anyone else. Leadership for them is all about screaming orders to morons from the very safe rear – with no accountability. If I were President, Clinton, Power, Rice and Brennan would all be looking for new jobs within a week of the first lie. You can bet your last dollar that all of this would be VERY different if only one of those who died in Benghazi was a women. This story is far bigger than Benghazi and begins all the way back when the decision to bomb Libya was made.
(But then I also would have fired Condoleezza Rice for her gross negligence in not fulfilling her sole function as National Security Advisor to ensure the President was provided with the best available intelligence on al Qaeda’s intentions prior to 9/11/2011. In our society, affirmative action women enjoy unearned “birthright entitlement” – which shields them from the same standards of accountability as are applied to men. It’s “against the rules” to hold women accountable. They merely fill positions in order to pad résumés without any record showing the positions were actually earned through the successful assumption of responsibility for others, and then actually accomplish anything worthwhile on their watch. American women have rights; “someone else” has the responsibility. Condoleezza Rice, of course, was actually rewarded for her gross negligence – by appointment to an even higher office as Secretary of State – when even a cowed Congress declined to question her about her failed role as National Security Advisor and responsibility for what transpired. No politician, and certainly no male politician, wanted to risk losing any of those super-majority of self-serving women votes.)
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The initial objective in Benghazi is to establish an Islamist state in eastern Libya, from which operations elsewhere, especially in western Libya and Egypt, plus Mali, can be mounted. Days after the attack on the Benghazi consulate, when the US Embassy in Tripoli issued rather firm advice for Americans to leave Libya, the Libyans were shocked to see so many Americans show up at the Benghazi airport to board evacuation aircraft. Most were mercenary hires of the CIA previously secreted into the country – who had an entirely different take on the state of Libya, the incompetence of the Libyan security forces, the plethora of local “militias”, the free movement of terrorist organizations, and the overall unstable environment in at least the eastern half of the country near Egypt, than did State Department officials. All of this was reported by the Associated Press; it just wasn’t picked up by the US retail “news” market – which had its own political election agenda. (It was probably irrelevant since Americans apparently don’t really care about this stuff anymore unless it feeds their own delusions about themselves.)
I guarantee that there was never an iota of doubt about the facts of this attack on the part of US intelligence and special operations people at the street level from the very first minutes, or that the attack was an integral part of a much larger strategy being carried out by loosely affiliated al Qaeda groups across northern Africa and the Mid-East. The death of bin Laden has had zero effect on the strategy and objectives of these groups, which continually make use of steadily increasing civil unrest to build their wealth, their armaments, their recruits and their dedication. Seeing a wide range of Western weaknesses – including significant financial instability, obvious lack of military commitment, bickering discord among member states, incompetent civilian leadership, and self-serving political propaganda – they are increasingly convinced that they will prevail. A chief aspect of their strategy is to fan and manipulate civil unrest to their own objectives, including driving out any Western influences in favor of their own extremism.
Addendum. Some have suggested that one or more US Air Force or Navy jet over-flights could have scared off those attacking the consulate compound in Benghazi, but this is rather naive. Less than a mile away was a semi-secret CIA compound from which a contract team had been searching for a huge number of SAMs missing in Libya since the bombing campaign had begun. It is entirely conceivable that the attack on the consulate was intended as bait for a larger catastrophe. All one has to do is imagine what happens when a fully fueled and armed F-16 flying at low altitude is hit by a SAM over a heavily populated urban area. A similar event could have befallen helicopters ferrying in rescue ground soldiers; without armored vehicles they would have to be inserted reasonably close to the compound, which would have placed them in a SAM or RPG kill zone even before landing. (Getting from Point A to Point B while also providing overhead support is always a major consideration for any military reaction force; a reaction force team sent from the embassy in Tripoli to Benghazi was significantly delayed at the Benghazi airport for lack of appropriate ground transport.) After the attack began, any reaction force would have to be huge and overwhelming, but a reaction force definitely was possible. The key is to get actual military experts in on the planning and execution, long before the event takes place. At the least this would have required CIA to be entirely forthcoming to Defense about their activities in Libya and State to be entirely forthcoming to Defense on the evolving security situation in eastern Libya.
From the moment the bombing campaign began, Libya was, and remains, a catastrophe waiting to happen. This is because it is impossible to affect what takes place on the ground without very significant pre-planning, pre-positioning and the presence of US ground forces who can try to orchestrate events with actually known local people, groups and leaders – according to some sensible plan. Absent those ground forces, the aerial bombing campaign was always just as much support to enemies as to friendlies. It created a totally unknown and unpredictable ground environment that was bound to favor those already organized to capitalize on the imposed disorganization for their own objectives, such as anti-Gaddafi militias, tribal factions and terrorist groups. Given that reality, it was a stupid mistake to establish a US consulate without very significant US ground forces to protect it and all American representatives occupying it.
The bombing campaign removed the established controlling structure and replaced it with dozens of warring factions, none of which can present an effective replacement for the previous status quo. Until such a structure can be replaced, hopefully with one that will mesh with US objectives, a process that may well take many years, Libya will remain up for grabs to any faction that can assert its will, just as in Afghanistan. Anyone who places US civilian personnel into such an environment without very significant US protection forces is an exceedingly naive idiot just begging for trouble. My own belief is that Libya will gradually coalesce around two distinct geographical parts – one in the west that is more marginally pro-west and one in the east that is vehemently anti-west and an excellent base for al Qaeda to launch operations against Europe, Syria and Egypt. Vast parts of the Sahara will contribute to this effort in northern Africa to the south, in countries like Mali, Chad and Niger and will also impact both Algeria and Tunisia. (Large numbers of weapons have already left Libya bound for factions fighting the Syrian government, as well as to Hamas and Hezbollah dedicated to the total destruction of Israel.) This dichotomy in Libya will eventually descend into violent civil war.
The Libya bombing campaign was simply idiotic. It was undertaken for primary objectives, mostly cheap domestic political objectives, that had nothing to do with Libya. It would have been far smarter to leave Gaddafi in place until an effective replacement structure could be organized, vetted, trained and supported – by US ground forces. Absent that commitment, the best option was to not get involved in someone else’s dispute in the first place, since it was always entirely predictable that the Europeans were never going to make the necessary ground commitment in order to affect a favorable outcome. It is incredibly easy to kill people and destroy things from a safe distance; it is quite something else to train people and build things of value up close and personal that will last out of the mess you create.
No affirmative action American woman should ever be appointed to positions of such power without working their way from the bloody mud up, without a very pronounced sense of responsibility for others, without a very strong demonstrated reputation of using logic, knowledge and expertise to over-rule emotion and think far ahead successfully, inherent to her nature. Now we have Secretary of Defense Panetta and Secretary of State Clinton running around all over the place screaming about very dangerous “terrorists” running amuck everywhere – which is exactly 180 degrees OPPOSITE to what these people were screaming BEFORE the 2012 election, while the Obama Administration was “explaining” to voters everywhere the total lunacy that “the terrorists have been decimated” and “al Qaeda is on the run “.
Invincible Probity 