“Us against Al Qaeda” is the narrowly conceived narrative among neoconservatives. As the politically provincial neoconservative foreign-policy paradigm has it, those were the forces that allegedly played out in Benghazi.
Understandably, Fox News is fuming over “A Deadly Mix in Benghazi,” David D. Kirkpatrick’s expose in the New York Times. For these Republicans hold that:
Mr. Stevens died in a carefully planned assault by Al Qaeda to mark the anniversary of its strike on the United States 11 years before. Republicans have accused the Obama administration of covering up evidence of Al Qaeda’s role to avoid undermining the president’s claim that the group has been decimated, in part because of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
The investigation by The Times, however, shows:
…that the reality in Benghazi was different, and murkier, than either of those story lines suggests. Benghazi was not infiltrated by Al Qaeda, but nonetheless contained grave local threats to American interests. The attack does not appear to have been meticulously planned, but neither was it spontaneous or without warning signs.
In particular are neoconservatives fulminating over the NYT findings that “turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault.” “The attack,” it was revealed, “was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi.”
I have no doubt, simply based on the history and policies of the US in the Middle-East, that to the extent the “American-made video denigrating Islam” is a symbolic proxy for the hatred harbored by the invaded Muslims for the invading Americans-–to that extent it is probably correct to say that the video, more so than the mythical Al Qaeda, was a catalyst for the attack on our embassy in Benghazi.
However, the NYT is hardly unsparingly honest; it is, in fact, as dishonest and politically provincial as the neocons of Fox News.
Predictably ignored in the Kirkpatrick article is that Al Qaeda has morphed into many decentralized operations that mirror the aspirations of the invaded Muslims to be free of invading Westerners—unless of course they can get us to bankroll their Baksheesh economy.
There is cross-pollination between these double-crossing entities. So wrong was the Gray Eminence on Iraq that the NYT reporter who piped lies straight form Bush’s White House to her Times readers was recruited to Fox News: She is Judith Chalabi Miller.
