I'm not quite as scandalized as some people seem to be over the fact that the Obama administration tried to sell a lie about the attack on us in Benghazi (it was a spontaneous riot because of a vile video, not a well-planned terrorist attack to commemorate 9/11) in an apparent effort to keep their "al Qaida is on the run" narrative going. I'm cynical enough to consider that politics as usual.
To me, the real scandal is that the people who should have cared about the safety of our people seemed indifferent to it, callously and cynically so. The most disturbing thing I've heard out of this whole affair has been the statement by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta that "you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on; without having some real-time information about what’s taking place . . ."
The notion that we don’t send our forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on is patently absurd and false. Simply said, it’s a lie. We deploy Army Rangers to take control of air fields and landing zones in potentially hostile environments, for which we do not know all of the desired information; we deploy Marine infantry into situations of potentially unknown threats all of the time all over the globe; each and every time a patrol left the outpost at the Korengal in Afghanistan, they were deploying into potentially deadly situations without specific and detailed knowledge of the situation.
Yet that's clearly become our policy, and it shows in microcosm what's wrong with the administration's whole "lead from behind" philosophy of foreign policy. It's not leadership at all. It's drifting with the currents. I remember soldiers being upset in Vietnam for having to ring up headquarters and ask permission to return fire. Have we made a national policy of that now?
