Enter
the ground, or in Washington to
the degree to which it represented
a danger.” If that’s the State Department’s official consensus on
the matter, the only thing left to
do is determine which lawmaker
can shout the loudest about it.)
That said, there’s no doubt that
all of the agency ass-covering is
bad and embarrassing, and I wish
that governmental culture in the
United States was vastly different
from the way it is. Kris Belisle’s
explanation of how Washington
works (“The number one goal of
most agencies is, frankly, to try
and make the principal [Washington-speak for the head of the
agency] look good, no matter
what the actual facts are, even if
it means lying to or misleading
the press”) shows how hopelessly
prevalent this aspect of governmental culture is.
If you strip all government
agencies down to their constants,
through some sort of regression analysis, what you will be
left with is bad lighting, indoor
plumbing, and a small army of bureaucrats striving to shield their
superiors from cock-ups.
The one thing, of course, that
makes Benghazi stand out from
all the rest is the fact that four
LOOKING FORWARD
IN ANGST
HUFFINGTON
05.19.13
Americans are dead. But their
deaths did not come about because the State Department engaged in the aforementioned CYA
mission. Rather, their deaths are
a natural consequence of the fact
that the United States intervened
in Libya in the first place. And if
we’re going to continue a Benghazi
inquiry, we should do so in a way
that questions the wisdom of the
If we’re going to continue
a Benghazi inquiry, we
should do so in a way that
questions the wisdom of
the intervention itself.”
intervention itself. Clearly there is
reason to believe it was very unwise. But it’s the original policy of
Libyan intervention that deserves
to be litigated — not the afterthe-fact bureaucratic touch fouls.
Of course, the reason we shan’t
be litigating the policy is fairly obvious — many of Benghazi’s critics are simultaneously in favor of
a similar intervention in Syria.
Many of the same conditions present in Libya are present there as
well, chief among them being a
sketchy “rebel” force that includes