Quoting Lewis’ own breathless prose, Friedersdorf points out that the decision to establish a “no-fly zone,” ostensibly to protect the citizens of Benghazi from Qaddafi’s wrath, was a complete sham, because Qaddafi’s forces were approaching Benghazi on the ground. Establishing a no-fly zone would simply give the western powers, of which the U.S. did not need to be one, a precedent on which to base a more extensive and more costly involvement in Libya’s civil war. “If we want to save lives [if we want to accomplish our own selfish agendas], we’ll have to do more!”
Lewis amps up the emotion shamelessly in his retelling: “Obama insists that he still had not made up his mind what to do when he returned to the Situation Room—that he was still considering doing nothing at all. A million people in Benghazi were waiting to find out whether they would live or die, and he honestly did not know.”
Is it rude to point out that Qaddafi was not going to kill a million people in Benghazi? Or that establishing a no-fly zone, which was all that Obama was agonizing over at this point, would have zero effect on whatever it was Qaddafi would do when his forces did reach Benghazi? I think not.
According to Lewis, Obama made his decision not to stand aside on truly Sorkinesque grounds—“That’s not who we are,” a line that probably occurs in every other episode of The West Wing. Not only does Lewis allow the President to explain his decision on a complex foreign policy issue entirely on the basis of intuitive virtue—“Sometimes you just have to put your foot down and say ‘That’s not right!’”—but he eagerly assists White House staffers [unnamed, of course] to define the President’s critics as shameless hypocrites—“They denounced us when we stayed out, and they denounced us when we went in.”
Now, of course, U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens is dead. Whether letting aging monster Muammar el-Qaddafi remain in power was a “better” idea than removing him is a moot point. He was going to go sometime, and perhaps the chaos would have been greater then than now. But one can wonder whether if Stevens’ murder would have occurred if the U.S. had not intervened.
Afterwords
I haven’t even gotten to Friedersdorf’s two main points: 1) that President Obama didn’t even bother to ask Congress about engaging U.S. forces in a foreign war, initiating military operations in a country that offered absolutely no threat to the U.S. merely because his gut told him to; and 2) that Lewis, “one of America’s finest journalists [NOT!],” didn’t even ask him about it.*
I also haven’t even gotten to Lewis’ shameless setup, leading off with a brief portrait of U.S. Air Force navigator Tyler Stark bailing out over Libya and then switching to a breathless account of some serious presidential b-ball. Lewis tells us, with an absolutely straight face, that if you go easy on the Prez, you don’t get invited back. Some people will believe anything.
Update
Glenn Greenwald (as always?) has more on Stevens’ murder, pointing out that the Administration lied copiously and deliberately in pretending that Stevens was murdered as a result of a protest over the now almost forgotten anti-Muslim “film.” Instead, the murder was a planned terrorist attack. Glenn also wonders if it isn’t sometimes a bad idea to intervene in another nation’s civil war, handing out sophisticated weaponry to people who aren’t afraid to use it and, unavoidably, alienating every faction that doesn’t come out on top when the shooting stops. He also wonders why a U.S. embassy in a country where al-Qaeda was known to be active proved to be vulnerable to attack on the 11th anniversary of 9/11.
*The sad fact is that Congress does not want to be asked whether to intervene in foreign countries. In fact, the sad fact is that Congress wants not to be asked whether to intervene in foreign countries. It’s not our job, man! Don’t look at us!
