We are going on vacation for about a week and a half in the middle of October, so I will miss the second Presidential debate and will arrive home, fully jet-lagged, on the day of the third. I expect to miss it, too. I understand the third debate is to be on foreign policy. I am sure President Obama thinks that this is his strong suit and that he will do well against Mitt Romney.
I would expect President Obama will say that his experience is important and that Mitt Romney doesn’t have any, maybe even using a variation of the International House of Pancakes joke used against Bill Clinton in 1992.
It is possible that President Obama thinks Mitt Romney will have a problem with inexperience because of all the problems President Obama had during his first year in office. For example, it took him months to figure out what to do in Afghanistan, which was surprising since he called it a necessary war during the 2008 campaign. And then when he did decide, his decision, to send in troops and to tell the other side when he was going to pull them out, was naïve at best.
But even since then, you have to wonder about his decisions and whether, if this is what comes from what he will call “experience,” we wouldn’t be better off with somebody else for the next four years.
Consider what, until a month ago, I am sure President Obama would have called one of his signal successes: Libya. Obviously, it is a little hard to call Libya a success right now. We did a lousy job of providing security to our diplomats in Libya. According to Jake Tapper at ABC News:
“ABC News has obtained an internal State Department email from May 3, 2012, indicating that the State Department denied a request from the security team at the Embassy of Libya to retain a DC-3 airplane in the country to better conduct their duties. …
No one has yet to argue that the DC-3 would have definitively made a difference for the four Americans killed that night. The security team in question, after all, left Libya in August.
But the question … is whether officials in Washington, D.C., specifically at the State Department, were as aware as they should have been about the deteriorating security situation in Libya, and whether officials were doing everything they could to protect Americans in that country.”
Eli Lake in The Daily Beast reported that the U.S. consulate in Benghazi had been bombed two other times this year, including one attack that blew a hole in the perimeter gate
And since then, the consulate grounds have been so poorly protected that it was CNN that found Ambassador Stevens’ personal journal on the consulate grounds and Washington Post reporters found other sensitive documents just lying around. A State Department spokesman said:
“‘Securing the site has obviously been a challenge. We had to evacuate all U.S. government personnel the night of the attack. After the attack, we requested help securing the site, and we continue to work with the Libyan government on this front.’”
I am sorry. That is not acceptable. Just get it done.
But even before these events, how much of a success was Libya? The Obama administration made a big deal in 2009 of its intention to “reset” our relations with Russia. But then they took a United Nations Security Council resolution passed for the purpose of protecting civilians in Benghazi and used it as a justification to overthrow the government of Moammar Gaddafi. Regardless of whether overthrowing Colonel Gaddafi was a good idea, Russia felt deceived by the use of the Security Council resolution for this purpose. If resetting relations with Russia was important, was what we did in Libya worth it? I don’t think we know yet, but I wonder how much thought the Obama administration gave to that question when they decided to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi and how much President Obama’s “experience” informed their decision.
Finally, consider some of the second-level consequences of our overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi. According to The New York Times on September 26:
“Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton on Wednesday suggested there was a link between the Qaeda franchise in North Africa and the attack at the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, that killed the American ambassador and three others. …
Mrs. Clinton made her remarks at a special United Nations meeting on the political and security crisis in the parts of North Africa known as the Maghreb and the Sahel, particularly in northern Mali, which has been overrun by Islamic extremists since a military coup helped lead to the division of that country this year.
Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb has long operated in the region, she said, and was now exploiting a haven in Mali to export extremism and terrorist violence to neighbors like Libya.”
What the article did not say was why and when northern Mali was overrun by Islamic extremists and when the military coup occurred. The fact is many of the “Islamic extremists” who overran northern Mali came from Libya. Malian mercenaries and jihadists had gone to Libya while Colonel Gaddafi was in power. When he was overthrown, they were forced to leave. When they returned to Mali, they joined with local jihadists to cause the unrest in northern Mali. The inability of the democratically-elected government of Mali to deal with this unrest led the Malian armed forces to stage a coup. The coup, however, has not quelled the Islamic unrest in northern Mali. (See here.)
Look at the order of events: (i) Gaddafi overthrown; (ii) Malian mercenaries and jihadists return to Mali; (iii) Malian mercenaries and jihadists increase unrest in northern Mali; (iv) democratic Malian government overthrown; (v) security crisis in Mali worsens.
Please understand that I am not saying it is the United States’ fault that these things happened in Mali. The people in Mali are responsible for what they do. But did the Obama administration think through what might happen in Libya, and elsewhere, if they overthrew Colonel Gaddafi? Were the decisions in Libya last year and this any better than then-Senator Barack Obama’s campaign promises in 2008 about the necessary war in Afghanistan?
President Obama will claim his experience in foreign policy is a reason to vote for him instead of Mitt Romney. It doesn’t seem like it to me.
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