Fear of ‘Another Benghazi’ Drove White House to Airstrikes in Iraq

[Purveyor]

WASHINGTON — On Wednesday evening, moments after finishing a summit meeting with African leaders at the State Department, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered a stark message to President Obama as they rode back to the White House in Mr. Obama’s limousine.

The Kurdish capital, Erbil, once an island of pro-American tranquillity, was in the path of rampaging Sunni militants, the chairman, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, told the president. And to the west, the militants had trapped thousands of members of Iraqi minority groups on a barren mountaintop, with dwindling supplies, raising concerns about a potential genocide.

With American diplomats and business people in Erbil suddenly at risk, at the American Consulate and elsewhere, Mr. Obama began a series of intensive deliberations that resulted, only a day later, in his authorizing airstrikes on the militants, as well as humanitarian airdrops of food and water to the besieged Iraqis.

Looming over that discussion, and the decision to return the United States to a war Mr. Obama had built his political career disparaging, was the specter of an earlier tragedy: the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and has become a potent symbol of weakness for critics of the president.

As the tension mounted in Washington, a parallel drama was playing out in Erbil. Kurdish forces who had been fighting the militants in three nearby Christian villages abruptly fell back toward the gates of the city, fanning fears that the city might soon fall. By Thursday morning, people were thronging the airport, desperate for flights out of town.

“The situation near Erbil was becoming more dire than anyone expected,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe the White House’s internal deliberations. “We didn’t want another Benghazi.”

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/09/world/middleeast/fear-of-another-benghazi-drove-white-house-to-airstrikes-in-iraq.html?_r=0

[CJCRANE]

2. That's the wrong Benghazi analogy IMO.

It's more like the original Benghazi crisis where Gadaffi wanted to attack the city and NATO invoked R2P.

[Igel]

3. And that worked out well.

One should never take boilerplate hyperbole at face value. I mean, Qaddhafi opened the gates of hell against his attackers, nobody ever claimed to have closed them, and I don't see demons and other denizens of the netherworld traipsing about the place. (Unless we include Strelkov and some edinoross.)

It's that kind of talk that R2P was invoked over. Self-servingly. Leading, of course, to the present democratic, rebuilt Libya that we all know and love, and that Obama, Sarkozy, and whoever the Italian leader at the time can proudly take credit for. I hear that Benghazi beaches are lovely this year and it's a top tourist destination for national leaders, and just a short hop to the international party-scene in a modern, liberal Tripoli. Quite the interventionist success story. /snark off


No, I think that Obama has a rather different scenario in mind. Benghazi is an annoyance. But deep in the psyche of many Americans is the picture of the Saigon embassy being evacuated as "we lost the war." (We conveniently ignore that the previous year we signed a peace treaty with Hanoi and Saigon, one not so much honored in the breech as utterly ignored by all sides, and it really was just the embassy and the Marines guarding it that were the main object of the evacuation. Along with as many "collaborators" as possible. But just as we "lost the war" after signing the peace treaty, Obama probably knows that some, at least, will say "we lost the war" a few years after he proudly claimed to have removed all troops under the '08 SOFA agreement he didn't negotiate or sign.)

[JayhawkSD]

4. We don't always repeat past mistakes.

Sometimes we make new ones. Sometimes the past was not a mistake. Sometimes the present is not. Sometimes the present has nothing to do with the past other than some facile appearance.

I think getting sucked into the Iraq mess, even with "limited air strikes" is a mistake, but to say that the thinking consisted of Obama wanting to avoid a Benghazi-type political fallout is just silly.

[cheapdate]

5. Right. The primary reason we take measures to protect diplomatic missions

and United States personnel around the world is "fear of another Benghazi". Seems solid.