Libya
June 12, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
I have been searching, so far in vain, for Obama foreign policy success stories in the Middle East. The Washington Post’s editors fare no better in their search: In Syria, where for three years Mr. Obama has assiduously avoided meaningful engagement, civil war has given rise to “the most catastrophic humanitarian crisis any of us have seen in a generation,” Mr. Obama’s United Nations ambassador Samantha Power said in February.
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June 2, 2014 — Paul Mirengoff
Abe Greenwald has written an important article for Commentary called “He’s Made It Worse: Obama’s Middle East.” We’ve already seen how Obama made it worse in Egypt. Today, we focus on Greenwald’s discussion of Libya. The Arab upheaval, unanticipated by Obama, hit Libya in the form of an armed insurrection against the Qaddifi regime. When Qaddifi quickly grabbed the upper-hand, the rebels appealed to the West for help to avoid
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May 20, 2014 — Scott Johnson
I forget precisely why Barack Obama volunteered the United States to lead (“from behind”) the effort to depose Muammar Gaddafi back in 2011. I believe our involvement had something to do with the hypothetical harm Gaddafi might do to various tribes of Libya, but it didn’t seem to involve any interest of the United States. I do know we lost four good men in Libya in the sorry aftermath of
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December 30, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
My initial reaction to the New York Times’ revisionist account of Benghazi was that if there’s anything to the story, Congress should hold hearings to test, in light of the new information, the competing versions of who and what were behind the attacks. This remark was intended to point out that Benghazi revisionism might be a dangerous game for Hillary Clinton and her supporters to play. I made the same
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December 29, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
One shouldn’t question the good faith of a news report merely because one disagrees with the report’s conclusions. But David Kirkpatrick’s revisionist Benghazi account in the New York Times invites doubt about his commitment to unbiased reporting about that tragic affair. My doubts stem both from the reporting itself and from what a person whom Kirkpatrick interviewed told me. Let’s begin with the reporting. Kirkpatrick centers his account on one
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December 29, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
Yesterday, in discussing the New York Times’ claim that, as far as it can tell, neither al Qaeda nor any other international terrorist group had a role in the Benghazi attack, I wrote: The Times chooses to focus on a militia leader named Ahmed Abu Khattala, whom it characterizes as “an erratic extremist” and very much his own man. But I believe that other leaders connected to the attack have
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December 28, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
The New York Times is out with a revisionist account of the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. compound in Benghazi. The Times says that in months of investigating, it “turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.” The Times also claims that the attack “was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.” I
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October 27, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
David Ignatius shows how Obama administration policy towards Libya fits a familiar pattern of unwillingness to support anti-jihadist forces and governments in the Middle East: For a case study of why America’s influence has receded in the Middle East, consider the example of Libya. Some simple steps over the past two years might have limited the country’s descent toward anarchy. . . . When Libyan Prime Minister Ali Zeidan visited
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May 22, 2013 — Paul Mirengoff
We’ve always viewed the Benghazi scandal in terms of (1) the Obama administration’s failure to provide requested security before the attack, (2) its conduct, or lack thereof, during the attack, and (3) its cover-up after the attack (along with, as we recently learned, its retaliation against those who didn’t feel comfortable about the cover-up). But there’s always been a fourth element — the administration’s failure to bring the attackers to
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March 6, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The Arab Spring is looking more like Springtime For Hitler all the time. The latest outrage comes from Libya, where 100 Christians from Egypt were arrested, allegedly for proselytizing. Representatives of the local Christian church say the men were working in Libya, but not proselytizing. Be that as it may, telling others about their religion is something they had a right to do. The creepy video below shows the men,
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February 18, 2013 — John Hinderaker
In Benghazi, four alleged Christian missionaries–from the U.S., Egypt, South Korea and South Africa–have been arrested for distributing extracts from the Bible, and may face the death penalty: Four foreigners have been arrested in Libya on suspicion of being missionaries and distributing Christian literature, a charge that could carry the death penalty. The four – a Swedish-American, Egyptian, South African and South Korean – were arrested in Benghazi by Preventive
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January 21, 2013 — John Hinderaker
The Washington Post reports today that al Qaeda’s successful attack on the Algerian natural gas plant has greatly boosted al Qaeda’s prestige in Africa. Along the way, the Post notes rather casually: The assailants were well-trained and armed with what appear to have been weapons from the late Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s arsenal. The overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi has turned out to be a terrible blunder. It has empowered radical
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December 30, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Well, why not? They’re one for one so far. Maybe someone will claim the bounty by organizing a group movie review. The AP reports: Al-Qaida’s branch in Yemen has offered to pay tens of thousands of dollars to anyone who kills the U.S. ambassador in Sanaa or an American soldier in the country. An audio produced by the group’s media arm, the al-Malahem Foundation, and posted on militant websites Saturday
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November 2, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
Last night, John wrote about the information revealed in documents found by two reporters for Foreign Policy when they visited the Benghazi consulate, six weeks after the terrorist attack there. The documents include letters, drafted on the day of the attack, that suggest the compliticity of Libyan officials in the terrorist attack on the consulate. The discovery of these documents raises additional questions relevant to Benghazigate. A threshold question, propounded
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October 27, 2012 — John Hinderaker
Barack Obama’s prospects for re-election have been fading for some time now. As Mitt Romney surges, Obama flails, embarrassing himself with silly trivialities that are often summed up as Big Bird, binders and bayonets. That’s what happens when your record is so bad that you can’t talk about it; not truthfully, anyway. So it has been clear for a while that Obama’s re-election hopes can’t absorb another blow. Which the
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October 23, 2012 — John Hinderaker
After the opening moments of last night’s debate, Benghazi went virtually unmentioned. But that doesn’t mean that the Obama administration’s most disastrous security failure will soon be forgotten. The Young Cons, Riddle and Rufful, made this excellent, brief video that exposes the administration’s dishonesty–assuming, as Obama says, that he knew by the next day that the murder of four Americans was a terrorist attack and not, in Mark Steyn’s immortal
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October 21, 2012 — Paul Mirengoff
The Benghazi fiasco has led to many questions, all of which cast the Obama administration in a bad light. For example: why was the U.S. consulate in Benghazi still open, given how dangerous the place had become; why, given that the consulate was still open, wasn’t there more protection; why, after the attack, was the White House so dishonest about what had transpired; and what is the U.S. going to
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