"Benghazi, Bowe Bergdahl, and manufactured brouhaha"

[applegrove]

Benghazi, Bowe Bergdahl, and manufactured brouhaha

By Andrew J. Bacevich at the Boston Globe

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2014/06/06/benghazi-bowe-bergdahl-and-manufactured-brouhaha/NAHKAKcWWvQMzhUq16pkZL/story.html

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The verdict appears to be in: President Barack Obama is incompetent and irresponsible, if not altogether wicked, a) because he didn’t do all that he could possibly do to save Ambassador Chris Stevens, killed in a 2012 terrorist attack at Benghazi, and b) because he did all that he could possibly do to free an American soldier, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl, until last week held captive by the Taliban for five years. But two molehills do not a mountain make.

What these two episodes share in common is this: The attention they have generated, verging on the hysterical, illustrates the ever-advancing trivialization of American political life. Before our very eyes, the ability to distinguish between minutiae and substance, between the story that deserves 15 minutes of attention and the issue of genuine importance, is vanishing.

At the State Department, Ambassador Stevens’s colleagues will rightly mourn his passing. Yet when it comes to demanding accountability, how does the loss of this one diplomat, however valued, compare to the thousands of Americans killed, the tens of thousand wounded, and the trillions of dollars expended in the Iraq war, which both parties in Washington, abetted by the media, have already conveniently forgotten?

If Obama’s trade of five Taliban operatives as the price to purchase Bergdahl’s freedom represents an affront to Congress, then what are we to make of his initiating a war against Libya back in 2011 without having secured prior legislative approval? Speaker of the House John Boehner wants hearings held to investigate White House actions in securing Bergdahl’s release. Why not convene hearings to inquire into the legacy of Obama’s extra-constitutional war to overthrow the despicable Colonel Moammar Khadafy? Ousting Khadafy was ostensibly going to advance the cause of democracy. Instead of democracy there is anarchy. Hasn’t Boehner noticed? Doesn’t he care?



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[TwilightGardener]

1. Obama won't be criticized for Libya, because the neocons and liberal

interventionists approved of it. It doesn't matter how it turned out, or how it ended up not clearly serving our interests--the foreign policy establishment wanted him to do something, and he did it. The same logic applies to Syria--doing something is always better than doing nothing, results that serve US interests don't fucking matter.