Libya in retrospect
The Deeper Blame for Benghazi
By ETHAN CHORIN, NYT
THE spectacle in Washington over the terrorist attack last Sept. 11 in Benghazi, Libya, is focusing on the wrong thing.
The biggest American failure wasn’t in the tactical mistakes about security at the diplomatic mission where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died. It lay in thinking that an intervention in Libya would be easier or less costly than it has proved to be — a judgment that led the United States to think it could go in light, get out fast and focus on the capital, Tripoli, without paying enough attention to Libya’s eastern provinces, where the rebellion began as a call for a constitution and increased civil liberties.
As a result, we underestimated the regional importance of Libya before the West intervened; misunderstood Benghazi’s importance in stabilizing postwar Libya; and left ourselves unprepared for the ability of terrorist groups to undermine advances toward civil authority there. In short, if the United States and its NATO and Arab allies had learned from the Iraq experience and implemented a full, well-supported plan for Benghazi, covering everything from technical assistance to security and staffing, we might have averted the attack and the momentum it has given to extremists.
I have always argued that the Western intervention that helped bring down Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was inspired and skillfully executed, and had the potential to do more good than harm. But American policy has suffered historically from the mistaken belief that Libya was at best a sideshow to whatever else was going on in the Arab world. And that assessment may have led many in the American government to think the consequences of an intervention there would be easily contained.
(More here.)
THE spectacle in Washington over the terrorist attack last Sept. 11 in Benghazi, Libya, is focusing on the wrong thing.
The biggest American failure wasn’t in the tactical mistakes about security at the diplomatic mission where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans died. It lay in thinking that an intervention in Libya would be easier or less costly than it has proved to be — a judgment that led the United States to think it could go in light, get out fast and focus on the capital, Tripoli, without paying enough attention to Libya’s eastern provinces, where the rebellion began as a call for a constitution and increased civil liberties.
As a result, we underestimated the regional importance of Libya before the West intervened; misunderstood Benghazi’s importance in stabilizing postwar Libya; and left ourselves unprepared for the ability of terrorist groups to undermine advances toward civil authority there. In short, if the United States and its NATO and Arab allies had learned from the Iraq experience and implemented a full, well-supported plan for Benghazi, covering everything from technical assistance to security and staffing, we might have averted the attack and the momentum it has given to extremists.
I have always argued that the Western intervention that helped bring down Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi was inspired and skillfully executed, and had the potential to do more good than harm. But American policy has suffered historically from the mistaken belief that Libya was at best a sideshow to whatever else was going on in the Arab world. And that assessment may have led many in the American government to think the consequences of an intervention there would be easily contained.
(More here.)
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