Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s much delayed testimony on the terrorist attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty at the U.S. Mission in Benghazi, Libya was remarkably short on facts and analysis and was further clouded by Clinton’s feigned outrage at a very basic question from Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin.
Why, Johnson asked Clinton, weren’t the survivors of the Libya attack interviewed before U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice's now-discredited public statements on the attack were aired?
“With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” Clinton told him angrily. “Whether it's because of a protest or whether a guy out for a walk decided to go kill some Americans, what difference at this point does it make?”
Clinton’s phony outrage shows once again the famous Clinton spin machine at work. Senator Johnson's question matters because the Obama administration -- from President Obama, to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, to U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice -- has been lying to hide the fact that they are losing the war with radical Islam.
Despite the Obama administration’s outright lies, conflicting statements and political obfuscation, other congressional hearings and documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, as well as the statements of truth-telling patriots in government, have proven the attack on our Embassy in Libya was a well-coordinated terrorist attack -- not a spontaneous riot in response to an amateurish video that insulted Islam. And, that this was known at the time of the attacks.
Yet Clinton’s testimony failed to tie all this together in any kind of coherent fashion.
“We didn't know who the attackers were or what their motives were," she said. "The picture remains somewhat complicated.”
Radical Islam is “somewhat complicated.” Wow, there’s an incisive foreign policy analysis for you.
Americans are uniquely unqualified to be engaged in a religious war. The very idea of a religious war goes against our history as a sanctuary for the religiously oppressed – yet we have been engaged in one with radical Islam for some 20 years.
While our “targeted strikes” and drone warfare have been successful in killing individual enemy leaders and operatives, they haven’t turned-off the spigot. Others have simply stepped in to take the place of slain radical Islamist leaders and new theaters of action -- such as Libya, Mali and Algeria -- have opened.
Clearly the Obama strategy isn’t working. We will run out of bullets, and money, long before we win the “war on terrorism” that way.
Republicans on Capitol Hill unfortunately did little to clarify the picture. They focused on Watergate hearing-style “what did Clinton know and when did she know it” questions, instead of the “who, what and why" of the deadly attacks.
Secretary of State Clinton’s testimony on the Benghazi attacks was all about politics, not the real crisis that the attack revealed: Obama’s failing strategy in the war with radical Islam.
As the attacks in Benghazi, Mali and the BP refinery in Algeria demonstrate, right now we are losing the war of ideas with radical Islam. If the Capitol Hill hearings and Clinton’s testimony shed any new light on anything, it is that our national leaders, Republican and Democrat, appear to be focused only on politics and entirely disengaged from the reality of the most dangerous enemy we have ever faced.
