Freedom Line Blog

Actually, if anything, Hume was too nice to her. On the Fox News Sunday show yesterday, he said she qualifies as a “competent” Secretary of State, but in no means a “great” one. It’s a segment well worth watching, because Hume makes a solid argument. That said, I think she has been only a small step above a disaster. Even acknowledging that bad things happen all over the globe that no Secretary of State can really be blamed for, the sad reality is that in almost every region of the world, American interests are now in worse shape than they were four years ago. Much of the blame should be laid at the feet of Barack Obama: After all, it is ultimately his policies, not Clinton’s, that are being pursued. But there is no evidence at all that Clinton in any way deviated, even in private, from Obama’s bad policies, and in many respects it seems obvious that Obama basically followed her lead.

So, where do we stand? In the Middle Easat, almost certainly worse than before. Turkey has gone further down the road towards open and troublesome Islamism. Egypt is a disaster. Iran is closer than ever to a nuclear weapon, and not only has failed to moved closer to the West, but has crushed a real, potentially powerful “freedom movement” while the Obama-Clinton team lifted not a finger. Libya actually might be slightly better (more US-friendly and ultimately safer) than it was under the mercurial Ghadafi, but compared to about 2005, when Ghadafi was completely cooperating with us, Libya is more dangerous to us — more unstable, more unpredictable long term. (This is completely aside from the 9/11 assault there that killed four Americans.) And even the overthrow of Ghadafi was a mess, with the US administration doing the diplomatic and military hokey-pokey — one foot in, one foot out, a foot back in and shake it all about — rather than dealing cleanly with the situation. Finally, of course, Syria is a disaster area, with more than 60,000 dead.

Most importantly in the Middle East, our ally Israel feels more isolated than ever. This is terrible.

In Africa, meanwhile, al Qaeda is resurgent. Algeria and Mali are especially worrisome.

Then there is Russia. The “re-set” failed spectacularly. Russia is more recalcitrant, less US-friendly than it has been since about 1992.

Eastern Europe? Our would-be friends there rightly feel insulted, stabbed in the back, and abandoned.  Western Europe? Well, the US image or influence there is about the same as when Hillary first walked into Foggy Bottom, but the state of Western Europe’s affairs is horrendous, with 26% unemployment in Spain and economic difficulties throughout.

The Far East? No progress against North Korea. Continuing militarily provocative actions from China.

How about the Western Hemisphere? Nothing good. Ecuador has joined Venezuela as uber-leftist anti-US agitators. Brazil has moved leftward and more corrupt, even as Obama has sucked up to it repeatedly. Argentina is again making noises about owning the Falklands (!).

Everywhere we look, the United States interests are no better off, and often worse off, than when Clinton took the reins at the State Department. As Hume rightly said, there have been no triumphs — but there have been spectacular failures, such as the murder of four Americans in Libya and the ascension of Mr. Morsi in Egypt.

Combined with Clinton’s repeated evasions of real answers, and of real responsibility, for the Benghazi fiasco, this record is one of failure. It would be a good thing if Mrs. Clinton’s retirement from State would turn into a retirement from public service altogether.

Another day of congressional testimony for Susan Rice comes with more indications the Ambassador to the United Nations will not become the next Secretary of State.

But do pity Ms. Rice, at least a smidge.  With the finger-pointing circus around the Benghazi, Libya fiasco, it’s hard to keep the story straight on what exactly happened and who was responsible for hiding that information from the American people.

To clarify things, The Blaze website (quoting Buzzfeed) lists at least five official versions of the truth from the Obama Administration:

1. References were removed to not tip off al-Qaeda and were substituted with “extremists,” according to David Petraeus.
2. The links to al-Qaeda were too “tenuous” to make public by the Directorate of National Intelligence because the source wasn’t trusted.
3. “The talking points were debated and edited by a collective of experts from around the intelligence community,” not just DNI, according to a DNI spokesman.
4. The CIA told Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte the FBI removed references to al-Qaeda from the talking points “to prevent compromising an ongoing criminal investigation.”
5. The CIA later called Senators McCain, Graham, and Ayotte back, saying they had misspoken to them and that they – not the FBI – had edited the talking points.

On the bright side for Ambassador Rice, so far none of the misrepresentations have implicated her or her office as the source of the misinformation.  At most (so far), we’ve got diplomatic (Rice and Hillary Clinton) personnel parroting information from the intelligence community whose job it is to resource diplomats.

As I understand it, it’s the DNI, CIA, etc.’s job to gather, interpret, and communicate information so that the diplomatic arm of the federal government can use it.  Sure, more and better questions seemingly should have been asked by Clinton and Rice, but ultimate responsibility for knowing and articulating what happened in Benghazi rests somewhere in the alphabet soup of the intelligence community.  Those lines of responsibility won’t change if Rice replaces Clinton at State.

Cold comfort, though, since it looks like scuttling Rice’s nomination will be the only chance the Administration’s critics get to actualize their displeasure.  Welcome to Washington.

As regular readers know, I’m something of a collector of asinine punditry. In the past, Tom Friedman, Joe Klein, and Gail Collins have all secured their place in my pantheon. But look out for the Daily Beast’s Michael Tomasky, who has been breaking land speed records for inanity of late. Here’s an excerpt from his latest, defending U.N. Ambassador (and likely Secretary of State nominee) Susan Rice:

… Are [Republicans] really considering filibustering the president’s choice to be the nation’s leading diplomat? That would constitute, among other things, an interesting form of minority outreach from the party that now says it’s so serious about winning over people of color. That party’s only two targets right now are Rice and Attorney General Eric Holder. Gee, what might they have in common, d’you think?

A couple points:

• Ignoring professional incompetence on the basis of race is not a form of ‘minority outreach.’ It’s a form of moral cowardice.

• These rabid right-wing bigots are masters of disguise. Tea Party enthusiasm for the likes of Allen West, Mia Love, and Herman Cain was obviously an elaborate misdirect. And we should probably add Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, and Susana Martinez to that list, since the hatred must extend to brown people as well.

The rest of Tomasky’s analysis has to be read to be believed.

He defends the choice of Rice to be the Administration’s public face on Benghazi (despite the president’s concession that she had nothing to do with the issue) by noting that “Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should have been the one to do those shows, and she was asked first, but she said no.” Oh, well, that explains that. Of course, why wouldn’t the Secretary of State be indisposed to respond to a security disaster involving American diplomats?

Defending Rice’s complete misrepresentation of what happened in Benghazi, Tomasky trots out the Administration’s excuse de jure: “David Petraus has confirmed that while he knew or sensed from the start that it was a terrorist attack, America’s 16 intelligence agencies weren’t ready to say that publicly, mostly for fear of tipping off the bad guys. So Rice said what she was told to say.”

It doesn’t matter if it came from Petraeus or not — this is an incredibly stupid excuse. You worry about tipping off terrorists when you have intel before an attack and think that keeping it quiet could thwart the plot and/or bring the terrorists to justice. You don’t do it after an attack, when said terrorist group is telling you they did it. Acting like you don’t know who’s responsible at that point doesn’t make you calculating; it makes you an idiot. And if the Administration wants to claim that it knew what was going on all along, then it behooves them to explain why they chose an affirmative lie rather than a policy of relative silence.

The upshot for Tomasky: ‘Benghazi … was a terribly sad tragedy, but the kind of thing that, in a dangerous world, happens.” A man who responds to avoidable homicide with fatalistic detachment. That about says it all.

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham preempted President Obama’s East Room press conference this morning by announcing that they would attempt to block — through use of the filibuster, if necessary — the potential nomination of U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice to replace Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State.

Their rationale: Rice was directly responsible for propogating the Administration’s now completely-disproved contention that the Benghazi terrorist attacks were the product of an angry mob that spontaneously turned to violence. Whether Rice is guilty of incompetence or deception (there’s really no other plausible alternative), McCain and Graham argued, no one who was party to the Benghazi debacle should be expecting a promotion.

That stance led to the president attempting to go all alpha male in his remarks at the White House:

“When they go after the U.N. ambassador, apparently because they think she’s an easy target, then they’ve got a problem with me,” Obama said. “And should I choose, if I think that she would be the best person to serve America in the capacity at the State Department, then I will nominate her.”

“Then they’ve got a problem with me?” Obama might as well have gone with “Nobody puts baby in a corner.”

No one is actually afraid of this president. Which is why Graham’s response was so perfect:

Mr. President, don’t think for one minute I don’t hold you ultimately responsible for Benghazi.  I think you failed as Commander in Chief before, during, and after the attack.

Just so. The White House is going to need more than bluster to dodge accountability for what happened in Libya.

The reason given is that the married general-turned-Director of the CIA had an affair.  That’s horrible.  But if this is a smokescreen to dodge responsibility for the Benghazi fiasco, the story – and David Petraeus’ reputation – will get worse.

Mark my words: if Barack Obama is reelected, he will be thrust into scandal perhaps before he even takes the oath of office for a second time. Though the media — with Fox as virtually the only exception — is studiously avoiding the scandal of Americans being abandoned during the terrorist attack in Benghazi, the implications are far too sweeping to be suppressed for long (particularly if, as Newt Gingrich has suggested, there is a damning paper trail floating around out there). The most concise reading of this development — and, in my judgment, the most accurate — is this one from John McCain:

This president is either engaged in a massive cover-up deceiving the American people or he is so grossly incompetent that he is not qualified to be the commander in chief of our armed forces. It’s either one of them.

Just so.

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.

I have a slightly different take on last night’s debate than Quin. Like my colleague, I thought that Romney’s performance was serviceable, though I won’t go so far as to say he ‘won.’ Truth be told, I don’t think either candidate did much to improve their standing with the small slice of the electorate that still remains undecided, as that group tends to prize style over substance and the constant sniping between the two candidates probably left the swing voters cold to the political process as a whole (that tendency also worked at cross-purposes with both campaigns’ efforts to win over female voters, who are notoriously averse to that kind of incivility).

I also saw a missed opportunity last night, but it wasn’t Obamacare (where I think Romney is unavoidably uncomfortable); it was Libya, where he completely botched an opportunity to call Obama out on his administration’s meandering, thumbless response to the attack in Benghazi (damage that was compounded by moderator Candy Crowley inappropriately — and incorrectly — intervening to agree with Obama that he had framed the assault as a terrorist attack from the beginning).

After the first debate, sources inside the Romney campaign made it known that they had encouraged the candidate to speak in a natural tone — as if he were addressing a group of investors — rather than memorizing sound bites and talking points. It worked for Romney as long as the topic was the economy, where he is in his element. But I hope that the team in Boston encourages a little more thoughtful planning as we head towards Monday night’s foreign policy debate.

Romney has never shown a particularly deep interest in — or understanding of — foreign policy, a trait which I’ve noted in the past could be a potential liability (though his instincts are, of course, far preferable to Obama’s). While I think next week’s debate will easily be the least consequential of the three (both because it’s last chronologically, and because foreign policy will not be a central issue of this campaign), Romney still can’t afford to be as lost at sea as he was at the end of last night’s town hall. Time to hit the briefing books.

Robert Stacy McCain: “By highlighting the Libyan issue and adding a new element of controversy, however, Crowley inadvertently ensured that the administration’s failure in Benghazi will be the focus of post-debate news coverage — which is unlikely to improve Obama’s re-election chances.”

Indeed, every news site covering the presidential campaign has at least one entry mentioning the Libya story – none of it favorable to the Obama campaign.

And even though some are prone to think Mitt Romney missed his one great opportunity to skewer President Obama with the Libya debacle, Romney gets another chance.  The next and last debate is focused solely on foreign policy.

Wanna bet Mitt will be ready next time?

John Fund says that the White House blame-shifting for the Libya fiasco is causing a rift inside the Administration:

Obama officials may have made a key mistake when, in their panic, they attempted to lay blame for the Libyan fiasco solely on others. White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters that responsibility for Libya lay with the State Department, not the White House. Ed Klein, a former New York Times editor who has authored recent biographies of both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, says his sources tell him that Bill Clinton is already pulling together an informal legal team to create a defense in case Obama officials continue to point the finger in Hillary’s direction.

“If she is left with this stain on her reputation, it could seriously damage her chances for election” as president in 2016, Klein told the Daily Caller.

So, after four years as a loyal Secretary of State, THIS is how Hillary Clinton gets rewarded by the man who beat her in the 2008 Democratic primaries?

Bill must be fuming.  Barack should beware a Bubba-eruption.

It’s not an overstatement to say that the Heritage Foundation has done the nation a service with its new video chronicling the Obama Administration’s deceit and incompetence regarding the fatal attack on our consulate in Benghazi:

I’d love to see this turned into an ad aired during the presidential debate on foreign policy at the end of this month.

In his column this week Troy noted the “suspicious sign of premeditation” when the American consulate in Libya was invaded by rioters on the 11^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Troy also pointed out other facts undercutting the Obama Administration’s claim that the attacks were a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Islamic YouTube video, such as the use of rocket-propelled grenades, knowledge of a safe house, and the release of an al Qaeda video demanding revenge for an assassinated deputy.

Now, even more evidence is forcing the Obama Administration to backtrack its version of the story.

Eli Lake of The Daily Beast is reporting that U.S. intelligence officials have confirmed that some of the participants had staked out the location prior to attacking.  What’s more, an intercepted communiqué “between a Libyan politician whose sympathies are with al Qaeda and the Libyan militia known at the February 17 Brigade – which had been charged with providing local security to the consulate,” reveals that the politician asked a brigade commander to “stand down for a pending attack.”

The growing body of facts make hash out of the Obama Administration’s initial characterization that the assault was simply and only caused by watching a stupid and little known video.  Instead, it seems far more plausible that the weak foreign policy stances of the Obama Administration emboldened the attackers to strike.  The White House’s reflexive crouch only adds to the problem.

Over the weekend, Nick Cohen in the UK Guardian provided halting testimony to just how macabre the  abuse of human rights by the Assad regime in Syria has become. From the piece:

To grasp the scale of the barbarism, listen to Hamza Fakher, a pro-democracy activist, who is one of the most reliable sources on the crimes the regime’s news blackout hides. “The repression is so severe that detainees are stacked alive and kicking in shipping containers and disposed off in the middle of the sea,” he told me. “It is so bad that they’ve invented a new way of torture in Aleppo where they heat a metal plate and force a detainee to stand on it until he confesses; imagine all the melting flesh reaching the bone before the detainee falls on the plate. It is so bad that all demonstrators have opted for armed resistance. They know it is about survival now, not about freedom any more. This needs to be highlighted: Syrians are fighting for their lives now, not for freedom.”

Looking back on 2011, remember that the Obama Administration pressured Hosni Mubarak to step down in Egypt despite the fact that it was clear that the upshot would damage American national security interests. We also intervened in Libya despite the fact that our interests there were peripheral at best. Now comes Syria: an ally of Iran, a sponsor of terrorism, and, as this article attests, an utterly wicked regime. Rarely is the confluence of our strategic interests and our moral interests so unambiguous. Let us hope that the administration doesn’t miss this opportunity, as it did in Iran in 2009.

For John McCain — who has never met an evil anywhere on earth that doesn’t require Spartanesque military might from the U.S. — Republicans that question America’s role in Libya and the continued need for a large footprint in Afghanistan are part of a worrying trend. As the Los Angeles Times reports:

“There has always been an isolationist strain in the Republican Party,” McCain said on ABC’s “This Week,” “but now it seems to have moved more center stage…. That is not the Republican Party that has been willing to stand up for freedom for people all over the world.”

McCain is engaging here in the logic fallacy known as “hasty generalization”. Just because some Republicans question the utility of some military missions, it doesn’t follow that they have a principled and categorical objection to America acting overseas. Tony Blankley makes the point with his trademark gusto in his column in today’s Washington Times:

… Almost two years ago, I was one of the first GOP internationalist-oriented commentators or politicians to conclude that the Afghan war effort had served its initial purpose, but it was time to phase out the war. As a punitive raid against the regime that gave succor to Osama bin Laden, we removed the Taliban government and killed as many al Qaeda and Taliban as possible.

But as the purpose of that war turned into nation-building, even GOP internationalists have a duty to reassess whether, given the resources and strategy, such policy is likely to be effective (see about a dozen of my columns on Afghan war policy from 2009-10).

Now many others in the GOP and in the non-isolationist wing of the Democratic Party are likewise judging failure in Afghanistan to be almost inevitable. That is not a judgment driven by isolationism. Neither are we – along with Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates and almost the entire uniformed chain of command – isolationist when we see no national interest in Libya.

This is not isolationism. It is a rational effort at judging how best to advance American values and interests in an ever-more witheringly dangerous world. The charge of isolationism should be reserved for the genuine article. Such name-calling advances neither rational debate nor national interest.

Bravo to Blankley. McCain is an honorable man — but one who ought to be a little more careful when throwing around ideological labels.

As I wrote earlier this week, a bipartisan coalition in Congress is growing tired of President Obama’s refusal to involve the legislative branch in the policy-setting for the conflict in Libya. Today that irritation grew to a head on the floor of the House of Representatives. The Washington Times reports:

Crossing party lines to deliver a stunning rebuke to the commander in chief, the vast majority of the House voted Friday for resolutions telling President Obama he has broken the constitutional chain of authority by committing U.S. troops to the international military mission in Libya.

In two votes — on competing resolutions that amounted to legislative lectures of Mr. Obama — Congress escalated the brewing constitutional clash over whether he ignored the founding document’s grant of war powers by sending U.S. troops to aid in enforcing a no-fly zone and naval blockade of Libya.

The resolutions were non-binding, and only one of them passed, but taken together, roughly three-quarters of the House voted to put Mr. Obama on notice that he must give explain himself [sic] or else face future consequences, possibly including having funds for the war cut off.

The word “including” in the last sentence is a bit of an overstatement. Since the courts will almost certainly refuse to intervene in this matter under the political question doctrine, cutting off funds is virtually the only way for Congress to impose real consequences (it’s also something of a proxy for a vote on policy, given that many White Houses argue that approving funds is the same as approving a war).

It’s not clear that this would be a wise move, however. Regardless of the initial rationale for the Libyan expedition (which was not compelling in terms of American national security interests), the reality is that the strategic landscape has shifted since the West has intervened. Leaving now in a rush has the potential to be more destablizing than not intervening in the first place. It would be better instead to set a few hard and fast objectives (killing Gaddafi, securing rebel control of certain parts of the country, etc.), achieve them, and go home, hopefully leaving that nation no worse than we found it.

That prescription may be less dramatic than the Congress wants. But that’s what they get for not speaking up sooner.

The always-provocative strategist George Friedman (head of Austin-based STRATFOR) is out with a new analysis of President Obama’s Middle East policy today on RealClearWorld (caveat: Friedman is always provocative, but not always accurate. He wrote a 1991 book titled “The Coming War with Japan”). As usual, Friedman’s work is rife with insight, but no single passage deserves quotation as much as his dispassionate diagnosis of the Arab Spring:

The central problem from my point of view is that the Arab Spring has consisted of demonstrations of limited influence, in non-democratic revolutions and in revolutions whose supporters would create regimes quite alien from what Washington would see as democratic. There is no single vision to the Arab Spring, and the places where the risings have the most support are the places that will be least democratic, while the places where there is the most democratic focus have the weakest risings.

The piece deserves reading in its entirety for its thorough analysis of the region, but this is perhaps its most important point. The Middle East needs real change before hope becomes an appropriate response. Newsroom revolutions are not adequate.

Fully nine weeks ago, President Obama assured members of Congress and the American public that U.S. involvement in Libyan “kinetic military action” would be a matter of “days, not weeks.” Notably, Obama also opined in 2007 that, “The president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”  Well, according to the 1973 War Powers Resolution, the President must secure Congressional assent for military action or withdraw U.S. forces within 60 days.  Today marks that 60-day milestone.  Well played once again, Mr. President.

Byron York continues sounding a lone alarm over the connection between ballooning welfare spending and shrinking defense budgets.  With the United States largely abstaining from the lethal aspects of NATO’s Libyan adventure, entitlement-heavy countries like Britain and France are running out of missiles.

The reason?  Decades of budget decisions that favored butter over guns.

On a trip to Libya, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) reopens the straight talk express:

“…it’s a sobering fact that many NATO countries, even some of the big ones, are simply weak. They’ve been cutting their defense budgets for years as their welfare state commitments grew bigger and bigger. Now, they can’t mount much of a fight, even by the small-scale standards of the Libyan action. “No one will admit it, but both the British and the French are running out of precision-guided weapons,” says McCain. “They simply do not have the assets.”

Not that this evidence is convincing to modern liberals.  York also points out that members of Congress’ Progressive Caucus recently proposed a “People’s Budget” that raises taxes to expand entitlements like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid while “reducing strategic capabilities, conventional forces, procurement, and research & development programs.”

We’ve seen the future, and it’s the near military impotence of Britain and France.  The United States can and must do better.

For everyone astonished or disgusted at the ease by which the political left either defends Obama vis-a-vis Libya or stifles the hysteria it unleashed against George W. Bush, there’s now a must-see video for you.  From “Obama is awesome” to Fox News slurs to citing “Saturday Night Live” or “The Colbert Report” as authority, the rationalizations offered by the female avatar defending Obama will sound familiar and elicit laughter.  Watch as the Obama defender’s male counterpart explains that Bush’s Iraq coalition was actually broader than Obama’s “multilateral” effort, that Bush actually obtained Congressional approval while Obama did not and that Saddam Hussein’s record of slaughter dwarfs Colonel Gadhafi’s:

Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.

View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.