On September 12, a few hours after I happened, I determined that the killing of the U.S. ambassador in Benghazi was an AlQaeda related operation in revenge for the earlier killing of the Al Qaeda leader Abu Yahya al-Libi in a U.S. drone strike in Waziristan:
Yesterday's confirmation of Abu Yahya al-Libi's death seems to be a much better explanation for yesterday's raising of al-Qaeda's flag in front of the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the deadly attack on the consulate in Bengahzi. The AQ people in the area certainly had an urge and a plan to avenge al-Libi (the Libyan). That this happened on the anniversary of 9/11 is, as the Zahwahiri tape demonstrates, NOT a coincidence! These people used the movie story only to raise additional rabble to cover for them.
The U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, thought differently:
“Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo,” Rice told me this morning on “This Week.”
…
“We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to – or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo,” Rice said. “And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there.”
Susan Rice was one of the three furies in the State Department that had urged for the destruction of the Libyan state. They misread of, or pretended to misread, the tribal insurgency against Gaddhafi as some kind of liberation movement.
Susan Rice wants to become Secretary of State when, in January, Hillary Clinton will leave the job. She therefore could not admit that her signature project in foreign policy, the war on Libya, turned out to be a disaster.
But after more than two weeks of dancing around the subject the Obama administration finally had to acknowledge what was obvious from the very beginning:
The top U.S. intelligence authority issued an unusual public statement on Friday declaring it now believed the September 11 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Benghazi, Libya, was a "deliberate and organized terrorist attack."
Still missing is the recognition that the rising of the Al Qaeda flag at the U.S. embassy in Cairo by some Salafists was part of the plot.
The false pretension about the attack brings the Obama administration into well deserved political trouble:
The Obama administration’s shifting accounts of the fatal attack on the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, have left President Obama suddenly exposed on national security and foreign policy, a field where he had enjoyed a seemingly unassailable advantage over Mitt Romney in the presidential race.
As Mitt Romney has no viable foreign policy program the issue is unlikely to endanger Obama's reelection but it may cost the democrats some points in the House and the Senate races. Acknowledging the true nature of attack from the very beginning would have done less political harm.
Susan Rice should be fired. True to the Peter principal she has reached a position where her incompetence is at full display. Senator Kerry, who heads the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and has a more realist than interventionist agenda, should become the next Secretary of State.
But in Washington being wrong only reenforces ones standing and no bad deed is left unrewarded. It is therefore likely that Obama will stick with Susan Rice as his next Secretary of State.