If these were normal times the sizzle of these missions would be quickly render itself in and out of the news cycle.
Not so Benghazi kept alive by the essentially rogue House leadership, Guess what, fate stepped in to prolong the agony. Seems it was the CIA was behind the script that Susan Rice got the blame for. This complicates the game to destroy the president. It doesn’t matter who appoints the director, the CIA is independent and also rogue. It is who they are and why they do their job so well, or not so well.
The fact that we are in a domestic quandary with the very premise of our country threatened by aggressive, divisive social engineering forays. One such ploy is casting a critical spotlight on every flaw in wartime diplomatic missions. That would be without concern for generations of embedded operational tactics before Benghazi that became standard at the State Department. But this time a failed mission has a political payoff.
These missions are complicated, not at all cut and dry like the conquest of Grenada. Libya is/was unstable; in that environment any ploys or plans that overtly address the landscape in the context of international treaties and precedents, is an excursion in quicksand. Dangerous gambits at best performed by CIA, and hostile to normal diplomacy. But joint missions are the rule and performed at extreme but routine risk, since the CIA appeared in post WWII geopolitics. So maybe in hindsight it is unsafe to set up diplomatic shop in a tinderbox but this is not the first time that happened.
In a previous Op Ed, Major General Douglas O’Dell’s mission comments, at their root, actually struck a positive chord about mission premise planning and logic. The timing was off and his target very selective by some standards but he is the general.
Fault line risk tactics are the norm in war zones or the aftermath, Combining CIA missions with close-knit diplomacy is inherently dangerous but, does Obama own the failure or is it all Russian roulette?
There are people operating domestically who have a mission too; to make Obama fail by whatever means. Their methods are dangerous to the country and they are making hay. Witness statements from the Rogue House Committee are altered and deleted, and an army of propagandists impregnates media and communities with rancor.
Even this forum is subject to planned discord. By that I refer to the previous misuse of Hatch Act tenets as a false talking points.
These are not normal times. The reality we know, balances on a mighty thin reed.
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