Scott Spiegel

President Obama, you may have heard, personally and with his bare hands made the phone call ordering Navy SEALS to execute former al-Qaeda leader and September 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden in Abottabad, Pakistan on May 2, 2011.

Over the six years of the Iraq War before he took office, Obama railed against the Bush-initiated conflict, insisting that the good war was in bin Laden’s adopted home of Afghanistan.  Obama maintained that we wouldn’t make significant progress in the War on Terror until we had killed al-Qaeda’s former leader, whom all evidence indicated was a graying arthritic hermit dwelling in a cave somewhere.

Upon bin Laden’s death, Obama became strangely detached from Middle Eastern affairs, as though his work fighting Islamic jihad were done and Americans could at last breathe a sigh of relief.  (It was almost as if he had flashed a “Mission Accomplished” sign!)  But bin Laden’s former terrorist group appears to have marched on without him in the face of Obama’s utter lack of interest in exerting any effort to halt their progress.

Counterterrorism expert Bruce Riedel argues that, since bin Laden’s death, we are witnessing the third incarnation of al-Qaeda—al-Qaeda 1.0 lasted until the fall of the Taliban, and al-Qaeda 2.0 until the death of bin Laden—and that al-Qaeda 3.0 is the most dangerous version yet.  Al-Qaeda has fanned out to new regions and established fresh bases of operation in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, in Syria, Libya, Algeria, and now Mali.  Al-Qaeda has exploited Obama’s shortsightedness in dwelling obsessively on whether bin Laden still had a pulse, and has built safe havens, expanded the ranks of its recruits, and multiplied its financial resources from a decade’s worth of kidnapping ransoms.

Following the Muslim Brotherhood’s hostile takeover of Egypt—which Obama facilitated via his encouragement of Hosni Mubarak’s overthrow and his friendly discussions with the group’s candidate Mohamed Morsi—the nation now faces renewed threats from a resurgent al-Qaeda.  After bin Laden’s successor Ayman Zawahiri recently called for members of the network to kidnap and kill Westerners worldwide, a horrific Mumbai-style terrorist plot to murder hundreds of British tourists staying at the Sharm el-Sheikh resort was narrowly thwarted.  The presence of Safali Islam fundamentalists tied to al-Qaeda remains strong in Egypt, and al-Qaeda-affiliated groups have been attacking soldiers, gas pipelines, and churches.

In Syria, al-Qaeda affiliate al-Nusra is exploiting the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime by fighting alongside rebel forces, riding their momentum and waiting to grab power when al-Assad falls so they can restore an Islamic Caliphate.  Al-Nusra has committed dozens of suicide bombings, ambushes, raids, and assassinations in Damascus, Aleppo, and other Syrian cities, and has videotaped shootings and beheadings of al-Assad soldiers and posted them online to intimidate the opposition.  Al-Nusra hopes to replace something bad—al-Assad—with something even worse—a Taliban-style theocracy—in the same way that the Muslim Brotherhood helped protestors topple Hosni Mubarak in Egypt only to elbow their way into power and impose their own heavy-handed agenda.

Meanwhile, in Benghazi, al-Qaeda is targeting British and German tourists, whose governments are urging them to leave Libya for their own safety.  Benghazi, you may recall, is the site of the embassy storming last September that resulted in the deaths of four Americans, and was planned by al-Qaeda—or maybe it was a spontaneous protest over an amateur video; what difference does it make?

Then there’s the shocking hostage-taking at an Algerian gas plant last month, one of the largest and most sophisticated such operations in the region, which resulted in the murder of dozens of Westerners.

And Gadhafi’s ouster freed gun-runners to smuggle caches of Libyan arms, and legions of resistance fighters to flee, to Mali.  French troops are currently beating back al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists in the North African country, an effort Obama won’t commit the U.S. to making.

One military commander in Benghazi notes, “Libya became a haven for [al-Qaeda].  The Westerners are fearful that what happened in Algeria will take place in Libya.  And here, just like Mali and Egypt and Iraq, these groups have extensions.”  These groups have extensions in many other countries in the region, and we are soon about to find out the hard way which ones.

Liberals cite Obama’s bin Laden killing as proof that Democrats are tough on terror—maybe even tougher than misguided Republicans.  But in fact, bin Laden’s assassination made no dent in the War on Terror.  It will merely serve as a shield to hide Obama’s noninterventionist, ineffectual, crisis-precipitating Middle East policy for the next four years.

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Mitt Romney may have been too polite in Monday night’s presidential debate to critique the Obama administration’s mishandling of the Benghazi terrorist attack, but I’m not.

Immediately after presidential candidate and potential Commander-in-Chief Romney opined on the Libya attacks last month, Democrats tripped all over themselves to condemn him for opening his mouth:

Watchblog.com declared, “Republicans Have Embarrassed Themselves Over Benghazi.”

OpEd News announced, “Mendacious Mitt Politicizes Benghazi.”

Joan Walsh bemoaned “Benghazi madness,” which she labeled “the latest right-wing conspiracy porn.”

Democratic Underground decried “Romney’s Ghoulish Opportunism Over Benghazi Deaths” and claimed “The Republicans have lost their minds over this Benghazi thing.”

Oh, please.  Claiming that the other side is politicizing an issue your side has bungled is the last refuge of a political scoundrel.  Democrats are masters of this ploy, as evidenced by other clichés they employ with abandon, such as accusing the opposition of “going on a fishing expedition,” “conducting a witch hunt,” or “mudslinging.”

The Benghazi attack is an issue being dealt with by politicians in the political arena, for which Americans will be deciding whether to hold political parties responsible in an upcoming election.  Saying that Republicans are politicizing Benghazi is like saying that Weight Watchers is “calorizing” the weight loss process.  Of course Republicans are politicizing the Benghazi assassination.  How could one even discuss Benghazi without politicizing it—through interpretive dance?

Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter, the most frequent abuser of the politicization charge, slandered Romney by implying that he was hoping for a foreign policy disaster like the Iranian hostage crisis to help him win the election.  Why can’t we take Cutter’s periodic flimsy accusations against Romney as a model and announce that every Democratic attack is merely “cutterizing” the issues?

Here’s something that is genuinely politicizing the Benghazi issue: appearing on a late-night comedy show and announcing that the assassination of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other American personnel is “not optimal.”  Obama has tried to downplay the severity of this crisis and its causal roots in his administration’s strategic blunders and tactical failures in the Middle East, so he’s loath to summon the proper outrage—which Romney has displayed in droves—over this historic attack.  Calculating the precise tone that will allow Americans to believe he’s upset, without escalating the issue to the level of severity it warrants, is politicizing the issue.

As Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler noted, “For political reasons, it certainly was in the White House’s interests to not portray the attack as a terrorist incident, especially one that took place on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks.”  Obama’s clinical, detached answer on Jon Stewart’s show fit this narrative perfectly.

Here’s something else that’s politicizing the issue: excoriating Romney for rushing to judgment and “shooting from the hip” about the administration’s role in the incident, while jumping to the conclusion that the attacks were caused by an online video and not a coordinated assault.

If Commanders-in-Chief are supposed to be measured and to reserve judgment till facts are known, why did the administration send U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice out on five talk shows mere days after the attacks to insist that the protests were instigated by “The Innocence of Muslims,” a claim that contradicts the facts?

The Benghazi cover-up may not be a case of “What did the president know and when did he know it?” but “What did the president’s lackeys say and when did they open their yappers?”

But what makes the charge that Republicans are politicizing Benghazi especially preposterous is that it ignores that the GOP is the party that has traditionally called for stronger military and security operations, waged a more aggressive war against Islamic terrorism, and criticized Western military involvement in the Libyan protests.

It would be one thing if conservatives feigned outrage over Obama’s handling of wind farm permits or fuel efficiency standards.  That would be a bit rich.  But if anything, going overboard on military precautions is the GOP’s métier.  So I think most Americans accept that Republicans are genuinely concerned about attacks and protests in Libya, Egypt, and Yemen, three countries that had supposedly been cleansed by the Arab Spring conservatives were vocally skeptical about last year.

Cutter insists that we can’t talk about what happened in Benghazi, because there’s an ongoing investigation that will uncover all the facts—no doubt safely after the presidential election has concluded.  Heaven forfend that the challenger critique the incumbent’s handling of the incident and offer a contrasting approach to governing.  God forbid that voters be allowed to use an ongoing crisis to choose between two politicians’ vastly different approaches to foreign policy.

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics



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Has Mitt Romney sewed up the 2012 election and begun issuing policy pronouncements via the Office of the President-Elect?  That’s what you’d think to hear mainstream news commentators tell it.

Witness the media uproar over Romney’s absolutely true, courageously firm observation that President Obama’s State Department is more interested in sparing the feelings of Muslim terrorists than standing up for American values.

Rather than evaluating and refuting his charges; rather than critically reexamining Obama’s approach; rather than considering the repercussions of the President’s conciliatory stance toward our enemies; liberals… blamed the crisis on someone who doesn’t even work for the government.

Rachel Maddow cried that we were in the middle of a tense, hair-trigger confrontation requiring suave diplomatic prowess, and that Romney may just have sent rioting protestors over the top.

Newsflash, MSNBC hosts: Rioting protestors were already over the top—literally, in the case of the embassy walls they scaled and the black Al Qaeda victory banners they hoisted after tearing down and burning American flags in Egypt and Libya.

Fanatic Muslim savages don’t need an excuse to wreak havoc against the West.  A few boilerplate conservative statements by an American presidential candidate don’t rouse them from a stance of tranquil tolerance to one of prickly outrage.  They’re already perpetually in a state of prickly outrage.

Rioters didn’t require a shoddy 14-minute YouTube film trailer to cause mayhem on September 11.  They were already sufficiently motivated to murder American ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens and drag his body through the streets.  Even the Obama administration now admits that Stevens’ murder was a terrorist attack, and new evidence suggests that Al Qaeda was behind it.

But by liberals’ calculation, the real policy-driver, the de facto Commander in Chief, the actual mover and shaker who’s screwing up the Middle East, is an unemployed father of five struggling to keep even with Obama in the polls.

Consider the essence of Democrats’ “Blame Bush” strategy, which they initiated at the height of the 2008 presidential campaign season and have continued right up through August’s lousy job numbers.  Remember that their approach did not merely take Bush to task for things he did wrong.  Most conservatives will happily rattle off a laundry list of complaints about Bush, from his expanding government entitlement programs to his failing to win the Iraq War early and decisively enough.

No, “Blame Bush” was the catchall excuse Democrats evolved to protect Obama from unflattering comparisons to the far more experienced Republican candidate Senator John McCain, and from criticism of his handling of the economy and international relations once President.

Obama wasted four years spending the country into oblivion; but when we failed to recover from the recession, Democrats blamed Bush for leaving him an economy much worse than was imaginable by anyone, including liberal economists we were supposed to trust regarding the restorative effect of Obama’s stimulus bill.

Obama spent four years bowing and scraping before our enemies; but when he pledged to sit down and talk with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad without preconditions, and Iran responded by defying the international prohibition on continuing its nuclear weapons program, Democrats blamed Bush for creating a hostile negotiation environment.

If Mitt Romney is elected president, Democrats’ strategy will transition from blaming everything on Bush to blaming it on Romney, as though Obama’s four-year stint in the White House left no trace.

But I don’t know anyone who anticipated that Democrats would be desperate enough to start blaming the unelected Romney for Obama’s failures.

Of course the real culprit behind the foreign policy debacle in Libya and Egypt is not Romney but Obama.  It was Obama’s State Department that failed to adequately secure the breached embassies ahead of 9/11, despite warnings of attacks; failed to deploy Marines to secure the premises; released from Gitmo a detainee involved in the attacks; fell all over themselves to issue apologies for Americans’ trampling on Muslim sensibilities; harassed the director of the trailer for making the video, Pastor Terry Jones for promoting it, and Google and YouTube for hosting it; and spent four years denying that America stands for any particular virtues that are superior to those of any other country.

(Does Obama really think having a half-Indonesian sister so endears him to the Muslim world that his State Department doesn’t need to raise the security level a notch at Middle Eastern embassies every time 9/11 rolls around?)

Mitt Romney’s Libya statement—like his 47% “gaffe” earlier this week—provided a badly needed kick in the pants to a nation accustomed to four years of Obama.  Romney’s clarification of the situation in Libya and Egypt constituted the proverbial wakeup call: “The first step in realizing our country is weak under Obama is realizing we have a problem.”

But who will Democrats blame Obama’s failures on for the next four years if Romney loses?

Previously published in modified form at Red Alert Politics



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Time magazine recently awarded its vaunted Person of the Year title to “The Protestor.”

The increasingly irrelevant weekly has been moving away from traditional designations of actual, individual human beings as Person of the Year for a while now.  Apparently the left-leaning journal has been ever more swayed by the collectivist notion that there are no individual heroes or titans that drive the world—just influences, movements, and groundswells.  Recent winners of Time’s award have consisted of The Peacemakers (including founder of modern terrorism Yasser Arafat), The Whistleblowers (including an Enron staffer who warned about bad accounting practices), and The Good Samaritans (including certified bobblehead Bono).

At least those titles went to groups of several persons each.  Time’s latest choice encompasses literally millions of human beings.  It’s as vague and vacuous as the phrase “War on Poverty.”

(I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised at Time’s latest addle-headed selection; this is the same magazine that chose Vladimir Putin as Person of the Year in 2007 and, um, “You” in 2006.)

Throughout its lengthy cover story, Time boosts “protesting” as if it were just another Internet craze, like planking, owling, or Batmanning.

In saluting The Protestor, Time recklessly combines the following disparate groups: pro-democracy protestors in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, and Bahrain; anti-corruption protestors in Russia and India; Tea Party protestors; Occupy Wall Street protestors; “Real Democracy” protestors in Spain; public sector union benefit cut protestors in Wisconsin; and austerity cut protestors in Athens and London.  Practically kissing cousins!

In a related photo essay, the editors casually juxtapose portraits of figures from different groups: an Egyptian democracy demonstrator next to an Occupy Wall Streeter; a Tunisian women’s rights advocate beside a Greek austerity protestor.

The spurious comparison of democracy advocates to anti-capitalist ne’er-do-wells is no doubt a means for liberal Time editors to pat themselves on the backs.  By placing leftist rallies in the same league as pro-freedom demonstrations, they grant the former a degree of legitimacy unobtainable through these mob movements’ flimsy philosophical grounding or scant public support.

Predictably, Time focuses on the superficial similarities between Arab Spring and Occupy/austerity protestors, such as their relative youth, use of social media to mobilize, display of slogans, clashes with police, and impatience with “the system.”

In a video explaining the reasoning behind his choice, the author of the Time piece—whose nephew was a figure in the Occupy movement—claims that the Arab protests are a more “extreme” version of what happened in New York.

This is utterly wrongheaded.

Pro-democracy protestors and Occupy/austerity protestors not only have nothing in common, they’re polar opposites.  Arab Spring demonstrators protested for more freedom; Occupy parasites protested for less.

Occupy Wall Street protestors want more government regulation of the financial sector, tougher restrictions on bank lending practices, greater taxation of high-income earners, more wealth confiscation and redistribution, and more government control of health care, college tuition, and private sector wages.  Public sector union members crave more taxpayer dollars for lavish benefits and pension packages few in the private sector receive and more power to bully employees into joining unions.  Austerity protestors demand more government-mandated support for slothful Southern European lifestyles.

Pro-democracy protestors, meanwhile, desire freedom of speech and freedom to run a business without the government throwing them in jail or confiscating their property.

Lumping pro-democracy protestors in Arab dictatorships with Occupy Wall Street malcontents is like massing Martin Luther King followers with Ku Klux Klan marchers and naming Person of the Year “The Racial Justice Advocate.”

Yes, Occupy and union protestors were “inspired” by the Arab Spring and conferred with several of their leaders.  But these groups clearly were stimulated by Arab protestors’ techniques, not their pro-liberty message.

Even the Time piece’s author seems to recognize on some level that he’s comparing apples and oranges.  As he notes, “The protesters in the Middle East and North Africa are literally dying to get political systems that roughly resemble the ones that seem intolerably undemocratic to protesters in Madrid, Athens, London and New York City.”  Then why dishonor the former by tossing them in with the latter?

If protest was on Time editors’ minds—and there certainly was a lot of noisy protesting this year—then their Person of the Year title should have gone to Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street vendor who set himself on fire after bureaucratic authorities repeatedly quashed his efforts to sell his wares and make an honest living.  Bouazizi was the single person most responsible for setting off the chain of pro-democracy protests in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, et al., and the subsequent elections and tumultuous regime changes that will alter the course of Middle Eastern history for better or for worse.



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Here’s a fun fact regarding President Obama’s Saturday announcement that the U.S. would finally be getting around to joining the international coalition to use military force against Libya’s Colonel Moammar Qaddafi in retaliation for his having unleashed government firepower against rebels.  Guess how many times Obama used any of the following words in his speech: victory, victorious, win, winning, defeat, right, just, moral, triumph, success, good, evil.  (Hint: it’s the same number of controversial NCAA Final Four picks he made last week.)  That’s right—0!

In contrast, he managed to squeeze in all of these words and phrases: international (10 uses), allies (6), partners (6), community (5), United Nations (3), not acting alone (3), coalition (2), league (2), council (2), coordinate (2), agree, join, meet, part, and union.

With so little emphasis on what we’re actually doing in Libya, how we’re going to do it, and with what expected results, an alien visiting Earth might be forgiven for wondering why we need to engage in so much coalition-building to do it.

What kind of corporation launching a new product deemphasizes: the product, the technology required to develop it, the need for it in the market, and the projected sales; yet fills up their business plan with reams of details on which contractors they’re going to generously give business to, which stores they’re going to offer their product to, which companies’ toes they’re going to avoid stepping on, and which corporations they might someday merge with?

The message Obama has been sending the world is: we’re not necessarily going to do anything about Libya, and we’re definitely not going to take the lead on it, but if there are lots of others of you who are going to do something, then we’re right there with you.

There are good arguments for and against bombing Libya; a sane case can be made either way.  A surprising number of liberals have come out in favor (Hillary Clinton, John Kerry); a surprising number of conservatives have come out against (Andrew McCarthy, Haley Barbour).

I happen to favor air strikes, though not without being able to see the other side’s point.  The idea that we should butt out of Libya, Egypt, Iran, etc. is premised on the notion that no matter what we do, Middle Eastern dictators will be replaced by worse dictators of the hard-line Islamic variety.  I reject this idea, and I don’t care about the warning the do-nothing crowd has offered that radical Islamist groups favor removing these tyrants.  Just because those groups support toppling Ahmadinejad, Mubarak, and Qaddafi doesn’t mean we can’t support it, but for different reasons.  They support it because it’s their best chance to install Islamic leaders; we support it because it’s our best chance to install pro-liberty leaders.  The choice isn’t “Do nothing” or “Topple the dictator and let the chips fall where they may”—the missing alternative is “Topple the dictator, and make sure someone better gets in there.”

That said, if I were Leader of the Free World, I think I would have circulated an inkling to the globe what my position was one way or another, pretty early on, before any action were too late.

Instead, Obama has given the impression that he wanted to find out what the cool kids were doing so he could join them and be part of the crowd.

It wouldn’t be so bad if we could believe that Obama has been seriously, meticulously scrutinizing the situation in Libya, weighing his options, not committing until the exact right time.  (It wouldn’t be so bad, in other words, if Obama hadn’t been spending his time playing golf, announcing his bracket picks, and practicing his Brazilian Portuguese.)  But given his talk during the 2008 campaign about the necessity of international consensus and the arrogance of acting alone, odds are he was waiting until a critical mass of world players signed on before sticking his scrawny neck out.

There are three possibilities that explain Obama’s dithering on Libya, none reassuring.  First: he had no idea what to do, was being pushed back and forth by pro- and anti-invasion camps in his administration, and simply went with the international consensus once it coalesced.  Second: he favored invasion, but didn’t want to take action until there was international support.  Third, and most disturbing: he didn’t favor invasion, but decided to go with that option once the world’s players came out for it.

Given Obama’s hemming and hawing on Afghanistan, whereby private accounts suggest he didn’t want to initiate a troop surge in 2009 but did so anyway, and given his indirect ties to Qaddafi via Reverend Jeremiah Wright and Louis Farrakhan, I fear the third possibility most likely.

Behold a president who acts, not because he believes the United States has a unique historical and moral standing in the world and should take the lead on rectifying injustice, and possibly not even because he thinks it’s the right thing to do, but because… everyone else is doing it.



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