Mistaken blame
The Next Scapegoat
By DAVID BROOKS, NYT
Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department.
Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.
The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.
It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.
Let’s review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security.
(More here.)
Twenty years ago, when she was a young Foreign Service officer in Moscow, Victoria Nuland gave me a dazzling briefing on the diverse factions inside the Russian parliament. Now she is a friend I typically see a couple times a year, at various functions, and I have watched her rise, working with everybody from Dick Cheney to Hillary Clinton, serving as ambassador to NATO, and now as a spokeswoman at the State Department.
Over the past few weeks, the spotlight has turned on Nuland. The charge is that intelligence officers prepared accurate talking points after the attack in Benghazi, Libya, and that Nuland, serving her political masters, watered them down.
The charges come from two quarters, from Republicans critical of the Obama administration’s handling of Benghazi and intelligence officials shifting blame for Benghazi onto the State Department.
It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.
Let’s review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was. They erred in vetting the Libyan militia that was supposed to provide security.
(More here.)
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