What the unraveling of Obama's Benghazi narrative tells us

Obama was sure he could free oppressed people better than Bush.  He was wrong.

There's an untold story here, in my opinion.  I think that Obama thought he could do better than Bush.  Bush ended up claiming that advancing freedom was the primary motivation for his "wars of choice", as the Dems call our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Obama, I think, was certain he could do better--in fact, that he could "advance freedom" without deploying ground forces at all. Obama and his acolytes were sure they could precipitate a greater birth of freedom than anything Bush's bloody dying and stumbling managed.  Hence, as Morrissey puts it, "Obama pushed Hosni Mubarak out of power in Egypt, and he bombed Qaddafi out of power in Libya."  ...and now he's left the aftermath to his hands-off "smart diplomacy."

There are plenty of problems with this... but let's just point out one. If you remember, Bush tried basically the same thing: invade Iraq, get rid of the bad guys, then get out.  Bush learned pretty quickly, and at great cost in lives, that nature abhors a (power) vacuum.  The "wars of choice" that liberals so revile are really the "occupations" and grinding wars of attrition that are, in fact, the US trying to fill the sudden power vacuums created by the removal of prior regimes.  These "occupations" are intended to give democratic and liberal institutions time to establish themselves--hopefully strong enough to resist the extremists and terrorists who make it their living to not only be ready to take advantage of power vacuums, but to, in fact, create them.

You would think that the Alinsky-trained Obama would understand this.  How does the line go, something about making sure to take advantage of every crisis.  This is exactly what every extremist and terrorist on earth is doing... the only difference between an Alinsky-ite "activist" and a radical Islamist "terrorist" is that one seeks through violence and destruction to *create crisis* in order to take advantage of them, while the other peaceably protests until a good crisis comes along.

So here is Obama, joyfully and proudly helping to create a power vacuum with no intention whatsoever of doing anything to fill that vacuum.  What could go wrong?  Well, my friend, reap the whirlwind.  The Muslim Brotherhood surely is......



CS Monitor: Say, this admission on Benghazi terrorist attack might cause Obama a few problems

POSTED AT 10:01 AM ON SEPTEMBER 22, 2012 BY ED MORRISSEY

The cover story offered by the White House shows just how badly they miscalculated on the Arab Spring, and the inevitable seizure of power by the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and the rise of AQ in eastern Libya, two utterly predictable consequences of Obama’s interventions.  It also shows that the Obama administration, from the top down, understood just how bad this story was — and either lied to themselves, lied to us, or a bit of both in order to avoid the consequences of it.  That might be the most damaging revelation of all.