Iran, Benghazi, And The Age Of Partisan Everything

Fifteen years ago, Barack Obama helped depose Muammar Gaddafi by illegal means. In March of 2015, he ordered the U.S. military (working with coalition partners) to strike territory within Libya without permission from Congress, and he continued the operation even after the House of Representatives had voted to deny it to him.

Civil war had left Libyan population centers vulnerable to a massacre, and the U.S. was divided, both politically and ideologically, over what to do about it. Republicans in Congress did not conceal well their intent to blame an ethnic cleansing or a wider conflict on Obama. But they were also unwilling to hand him clear authority. They did not want to cast a vote like that anymore than they would have wanted to vote for another bank-bailout. And if, as an ancillary benefit, their intransigence created a no-win proposition for Democrats, so much the better.

So when Obama chose the assertive course of action, he actually had to overrule the legal guidance of his attorney general and other lawyers at the Justice Department.

When militants laid siege to a U.S. outpost in Benghazi a year later, Republicans had a choice: respond in the nature of a loyal opposition, or wave the bloody shirt. They would have been on relatively firm (though still hypocritical) ground dressing Obama down for taking lawless actions that placed Americans in harms way.

But a big election was just weeks away! Rather than do the dry, painstaking work of proper oversight, they created a cinematic universe in which Obama and his advisers left Americans to die in Libya on purpose, in the hope of covering up their own operational failures.

Instead of Benghazi, we got #Benghazi, and it changed the course of American politics.

Share

Democrats are, unfortunately, not of one mind about the lessons of this recent history.

From one vantage point, Republicans salivated over the deaths of four Americans in a cynical and unbecoming way. They launched a political attack before the bodies were cold. They snorted and freebased their own nonsense so aggressively that Mitt Romney (then the GOP presidential nominee) didn’t even realize he’d leveled a false accusation against Obama at the second presidential debate.

Republicans would go on to lose that election—though not principally because they overplayed their hand in the Benghazi matter. That’s not how they saw it, in any event. After licking their wounds, they didn’t set Benghazi aside and move on to more fruitful issues. They parlayed Benghazi—from a backward looking attack on a term-limited president, into a forward-looking attack on the Democrats’ 2016 frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

But it was still a clown show—at least from the vantage point of the reality-based world—because Republicans had nothing real to work with. GOP committee chairs would dole out context-free scooplets to credulous journalists, only for their reports to be debunked. Rank and file Republicans grew frustrated with the leadership when House oversight investigations hit dead ends pursuing nonexistent smoking guns. Eventually they tried to consolidate their aimless inquiries into a select committee, but that only fed further disarray. When, in defense of his party’s record, House Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy boasted, “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping,” it was universally understood as a scandalous gaffe.

Clinton famously testified publicly before the select committee for 11 hours and left her GOP interrogators looking like fools.

Through this lens, Benghazi was textbook overreach. A cautionary tale. Many Democrats still understand it that way. Indeed, it’s how they view the GOP’s overheated, insincere, hyperventilating approach to everything.

The problem with that view is that, as messy as #Benghazi was for Republicans, the gambit worked!