‘What is the difference between chaos and control?”
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) posed that question yesterday to a witness at a House Oversight Committee hearing into the State Department’s cascading security failures that led directly to the wanton slaughter of the US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans.
But the question also stands as an indictment of the Obama administration’s tenuous hold on the broader Middle East, where the influence and security of the United States are fading — and where al Qaeda is very much on the rise.
But first, that hearing from yesterday.
Eric Nordstrom, the State Department’s regional security officer for Libya, twice sought to enhance security for US missions there in the wake of cutbacks in the months before the 9/11 attack.
But Nordstrom says his requests were ignored by Washington “because there would be too much political cost.”
Instead, he was given a “danger pay” hike when 16 US soldiers from a Site Security Team and 18 members of three Mobile Security Deployments were yanked.
Clearly, the hazardous-duty pay means the State Department recognized the increasing risks in Libya.
Yet State Department official Charlene Lamb — who refused the manpower requests — testified yesterday that “we had the correct number of assets in Benghazi on the night of 9/11.”
That’s self-evidently false — to say nothing of insane — but it also telegraphs the administration’s cluelessness about the region.
After the 16 soldiers were removed, “there was a complete and total lack of planning for what was going to happen next,” Nordstrom said. “There was no plan, there was just hope that everything would get better.” It didn’t.
The Benghazi mission was sacked, four Americans — including Ambassador Chris Stevens — were murdered and the White House sought to cover things up by calling the well-coordinated strike an “impromptu” protest against an obscure online video.
In fact, there was never a protest at all — just a premeditated paramilitary assault which totally surprised Washington.
No shock there.
The White House’s attention has been elsewhere: Eager to proclaim victory in the War on Terror, President Obama spent a year celebrating Osama bin Laden’s death at the hands of Navy SEALs — claiming that al Qaeda was “devastated,” “decimated” and “on its heels.”
That’s not true in Iraq, where the number of al Qaeda fighters has more than doubled, from 1,000 to 2,500, since Obama withdrew US forces last year — and where there are now 20 al Qaeda attacks every single day.
And it’s not true in Libya, where Lt. Col. Andrew Wood, the former commander of the State Department Site Security Team there, told Congress al Qaeda is on the rise.
“Their presence grows there every day. They are certainly more established there than we are,” Wood said yesterday.
Of course they are.
Just as all but the sunniest optimists said they would be as the administration’s “leadership from behind” fell quickly to pieces after Moammar Khadafy’s inglorious fall.
Osama may be dead.
But al Qaeda is very much alive.
Another Barack Obama failure.