Benghazi & The Semantics of “Defense”

It is a sad, sobering fact of political struggle and the inevitable conflict and retaliatory violence that arise from that struggle, that innocent people are often killed or injured. We have witnessed the grisly evidence of that fact from a relatively safe distance, throughout the Middle East during the course of what has been characterized as “The Arab Spring” which ironically began with a Tunisian street vender setting himself on fire in a fit of impotent rage and frustration. This act, as well as the set of circumstances that allowed it to manifest itself in this way, is completely alien to our cultural sensibilities.

In a western world that is now forced to deal with the new reality of global terrorist acts, the mortality rate and the collision of radically differing cultural mindsets, rises exponentially. We have seen it time and time again yet it is still difficult for us to fathom how and why these savage and senseless acts of violence can occur. And while it is at certain times, more vividly obscene in terms of its scale or its immediate proximity, such as in the case of 9/11 and the carnage and devastation that took place on our shore and in front of our collective eyes on that fateful day, it is nevertheless, morally no less significant when this violence happens in a remote outpost, thousands of miles away from our eyes and our lives.

I was 3000 miles away from New York on September 11th, 2001. As I sat, blurry eyed, on my sofa with my morning coffee ( it was six o’clock in the morning in California when those horrible events began to unfold ), and I turned on my television to watch the usual patter of Katie and Matt, what I was instead greeted with were scenes that my still half asleep mind could not immediately process. I can still distinctly remember thinking in those first few moments that I was seeing a trailer for some new disaster movie.

When I was finally able to comprehend the truth of what I was seeing I felt the air leave me as if I had just been sucker punched in the gut. Tears would come, but not until much later. The enormity of the event left me in a suspended state emotionally. I did not know what or how to feel.

I shared that dissociative state with the rest of the stunned nation as we watched the world changing before our eyes. But as that collective wound healed, it left a scar, a kind of emotional callus with which we could better weather the treachery and violence of this new paradigm that had been thrust upon our collective consciousness.

In the aftermath of that event we did many things; we created a massive bureaucratic structure which we named the “Dept of Homeland Security”. We created a commission to examine the weaknesses of our intelligence and investigative infrastructure and how their counter productive hostility and mistrust of each other allowed critical dots in the progression of events to remain unconnected and thus left us open to such an attack.

We debated the merits of various solutions and we eventually came to a difficult and grudging consensus on how to approach the problems at hand. We are still at odds with the attempts that have been made to make us more secure as a nation while still maintaining the basic freedoms and liberties that make us unique in the world. We all agreed that changes needed to be made. We were able to make our nation more secure. But none of us are so stupid as to believe that we are now safe.

We made the door stronger but the wolf is still out there on the other side of it. We know that and we accept the truth of the world as it is now. The brave men and women that choose to be part of our diplomatic corp, just as those who choose to join the various branches of our military, accept the fact that the important and difficult work that they do puts them in harm’s way.

To our credit, the one thing that we did not do in those difficult days immediately after the attacks on 9/11 was to insult the victims and their families by reducing the event to a political sideshow. We did not sully the sentiments of a grieving nation by casting blame and unsupported accusations of negligence or cover-ups on the Bush administration and the various relevant agencies under its purview. We understood, intuitively, that to do so would be wrong. We understood that to do so would only make us weaker and more exposed. We understood that what we needed to do in that moment was to draw closer to one another. We understood that the enemy and the greater threat to everything that we held dear was external. We understood that war had been brought to our door. We understood that in times like that a nation must act (and react) as one.

So here’s the thing; when did that fundamental truth change? When did it suddenly become acceptable to cast blame and unsupported accusations of conspiracies and cover-ups on our President and his administration before any actual investigation had been completed and as the nation and the families of those that had been lost, still grieved?

The answer is that it didn’t. It is not acceptable to do those things for pure, craven, political gain. Yet that is exactly what is happening. And to do so is quite simply PROFANE!

The “kangaroo court” that is being presented to the public by Congressman Issa under the guise of a “congressional investigation” reeks of calculated partisan grandstanding of a grade and quality that would be the equal of any such posturing ever attempted by Joseph McCarthy.

While I believe that it is prudent to avoid speculation regarding the circumstances and the impetus of the attack until a thorough investigation of the facts provides us with some honest answers, I think that a thorough examination of the political shell game that left us vulnerable to it is fair game…

For instance, consider this interview conducted by the Christian Science Monitor of Scott Lilly, who spent three decades as a senior staffer for Democrats in Congress, often working on budget matters, and now a fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington DC. He says that the cuts that have been sought by Congress have been steep since the new House sat in 2011.

The Worldwide Security Protection program ( WSP ), which the government says provides “core funding for the protection of life, property, and information of the Department of State,” and a separate embassy security and construction budget, which in part improves fortifications, have both been under fire.”

In 2011 Congress passed a continuing resolution for the remainder of that fiscal year. “The House proposed a $70 million cut in the WSP program and they proposed a $204 million cut in Embassy security funding,” says Mr. Lilly. “Then the next year, fiscal 2012, they cut WSP funding by $145 million and embassy security funding by $376 million. This year’s bill is the same thing all over again. The House has proposed cuts to the WSP budget by $149 million below the Administration’s request. That’s not the actual budget – simply the Republican negotiating position. The Senate and the President have sought more money than the House for embassy security, but the horse-trading between them means that the State Department ultimately ends up with significantly less than it requested.

For instance, in the fiscal 2012 budget, the cuts over the State Departments’ request were “whittled back by the Senate,” down to $109 million for the WSP program and $131 million for embassy security, restoring $88 million of the administration’s request.

“We’ve got something like 260 embassies and consulates around the world, and there’s a remarkable number of them that aren’t anywhere close to “Inman” standards and are still particularly dangerous,” says Lilly. “Inman standards” refers to the report written by Admiral Bobby Ray Inman on US building security abroad after the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut that left 241 US troops and 58 French soldiers dead. Nearly 30 years later, many US consulates and embassies abroad still do not meet the Inman standards.

Lilly recalls traveling to Tashkent, Uzbekistan, on a congressional delegation years ago and finding the embassy, in a crumbling old Soviet party building, cramped and nowhere near a safe offset from the road to guard against attacks. “They had file cabinets on landings of stairways because they had so little room, the building was barely five feet off the road,” he says. “It was so bad that I got Bob Livingston, who was the chairman of the appropriations committee at the time, to cancel an event and go look at it. He was so upset that he put an earmark in a bill to fix it.”

CS Monitor suggested to Lilly that if there weren’t enough trained personnel for diplomatic protection in Libya, then maybe Ambassador Stevens should have reined in his operation and done less. Basically just bow to the limitations. Lilly pushed back on that idea: “If the foreign service took that attitude, a hell of a lot less of this really important work would get done. These people know that they’re taking risks just by being in these places. They’re pretty adventuresome and they’ve got to get out and do the job.” he says. “Benghazi is a critical part in the formula for creating a stable environment in Libya, and Stevens knew that he had to get out and work on it.”

To be sure, US missions abroad are generally much safer now than they were years ago, thanks to the partial implementation of the Inman standards and a major overhaul of security measures after the 1998 Al Qaeda attacks on three US embassies in Africa. Adam Serwer at Mother Jones wrote earlier this week on embassy security in a piece that has a chart on attacks on US diplomats going back to 1970. It shows that annual attacks have declined sharply since they peaked at over 30 attacks in 1991.- via Libya attack: Congressmen casting blame voted to cut diplomatic security budget – CSMonitor.com.

Last year Secretary of State Clinton warned that the Republican’s proposed cuts to her department would be “detrimental to America’s national security.” – a charge that Republicans rejected.

Congressmen Ryan, Issa and other House Republicans voted for an amendment in 2009 to cut $1.2 billion from State operations, including funds for 300 more diplomatic security positions. Under Ryan’s budget, so-called “non-defense” discretionary spending, which includes State Department funding, would be slashed by nearly 20 percent in 2014, which would translate to more than $400 million in additional cuts in embassy security.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-forget-about-b…

Congressman Ryan rails about an alleged projection of weakness being shown by the President and his administration. He decries that any cuts to defense spending leaves us vulnerable. Given the rank hypocrisy of Ryan’s political duality regarding this matter, it would seem that a new definition of the meaning of “Defense” should be supplied by the congressman and those of his party that would boost spending to supply money for projects in Congressional districts where defense contractors are located. Contractors that donate huge sums to Republican campaigns. But the funding for embassy security does not provide any such “return on investment” and therefore suffers on the altar of “fiscal responsibility.”

What really shows weakness to our enemies is a lack of unity. When they see us factionalized and fighting with one another in a time of crisis. When they see us recklessly accusing and betraying one another for pure political gain, we justify all of their worst beliefs about us.