How the GOP Libya Witch Hunt Made us Close our Mideast Embassies & Crippled US Diplomacy (Juan Cole)

How the GOP Libya Witch Hunt Made us Close our Mideast Embassies and Crippled US Diplomacy

Posted on 08/05/2013 by Juan Cole
About those US embassy closures in the Middle East: they make the US look like a wimp.

The United States is still the world’s primary superpower, for better or worse, and it has the potential to influence the world in both positive and negative ways. At one extreme, its unique geopolitical position allows it to violate international law with impunity and do things like invade and occupy Iraq in the teeth of opposition from the UN Security Council. At the other extreme, the US can play a positive role, as when it helped achieve an agreement between the UK, the Irish Republican Army, and the Republic of Ireland, in 1996. Or when President Eisenhower told then French President Charles De Gaulle that France would just have to get out of Algeria since colonialism was over with. On another level, US AID has saved millions of people from malaria.

As with George Mitchell and Northern Ireland, the most effective uses of American power have been diplomatic. But hawks in Washington always want to drag us into foreign wars, in part to benefit their buddies in the arms industry. The current GOP is divided on the issue of US power abroad, with Libertarians like Rand Paul viewing foreign wars as a waste of money and a fruitless enterprise, but hawks like John McCain and Lindsey Graham failing to discover a potential war that they don’t just love to death.

But the GOP is inadvertently pushing the US into a posture of dangerous diplomatic weakness. This weakness is clear in the unprecedented closing of 21 US embassies in the Middle East this weekend because of a vague terrorist threat apparently emanating from “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula,” based in Yemen.

The Obama administration most likely took this weird step to insulate itself from any further witch hunts of the sort the Republicans launched over the tragic attack on a CIA safe house doubling as a US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2011. That a radical extremist cell should have attacked in this way was a surprise, since the radicals had been persecuted by Muammar Gaddafi, and the US had helped overthrow the dictator. I was in Benghazi in summer of 2011 and was told that personal security was not so bad (you wouldn’t be mugged as an individual), but that militias might steal from, e.g., a company. The existence of a set of terrorist cells that would and could kill ambassador Chris Stevens and three others was not clear. When the surprise attack was launched, the Libyan government organized a special forces unit to extract the remaining dozens of Americans and get them to Tripoli, with it did without further loss of life. There is no reason to think that the Obama administration behaved inappropriately through the crisis.

But the constant innuendos on the Hill that some sort of malfeasance occurred in Benghazi has pushed the Obama administration to cover its collective behind. So the Tunisian and Libyan embassies are skeleton crews, with very few personnel, and their families have been sent back to the states. An embassy can’t be effective like that. But the embassies are less vulnerable to becoming Washington scandals if there is almost no one there, reducing casualties if there were another attack.



the rest:
http://www.juancole.com/2013/08/embassies-crippled-diplomacy.html