by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
PJ Media<\/em><\/p>\n What separated the great Athenian tragedian Sophocles from dozens of his contemporaries \u2014 now mere names attached to fragments and quotations \u2014 were his unmatched characters, an Ajax, Antigone, or Oedipus whose proverbially fatal flaws ultimately led to their own self-destruction.<\/p>\n The Libyan plot is Sophoclean to the core: the heroism of outnumbered Americans who chose to confront a deadly enemy, and were killed and wounded in the defense of their endangered comrades \u2014 while the world\u2019s greatest military hesitated to use its power against a ragtag militia to save them. \u00a0Bureaucrats ignored not only pleas for beefed-up security before the attack, but also more requests that followed during the assault for reinforcement. A concocted story about a culpable obscure video gave opportunity for the administration to brag about their cosmopolitan multiculturalism as they damned the unhinged filmmaker and, in doing so, systemically lied about the real terrorist culprits of the killings.<\/p>\n The strange thing about Libya is not so much who lied, but rather the question of whether anyone has yet told the whole truth. When American diplomatic personnel are murdered abroad, an administration usually is vehement in blaming likely suspects; I cannot remember a single incident, however, when our government ignored those most likely responsible to focus on others least likely to be culpable. Once the election is over, and reporters no longer feel any remorse about hurting the reelection chances of Barack Obama, perhaps some of their usual incentives to crack open a cover-up will reassert themselves.<\/p>\n In Sophoclean terms,\u00a0hubris<\/em>\u00a0(arrogance) \u2014 often due to a character flaw (amartia<\/em>) \u2014 leads to\u00a0at\u00ea<\/em>\u00a0(excess and self-destructive recklessness) that in turn earns\u00a0nemesis<\/em>\u00a0(divine retribution). \u00a0In that tragic sense, an overweening Obama must have known that \u2014 despite the Drone killings \u2014 al-Qaeda was far from impotent. And it was not wise, as Obama once himself warned, to high-five the bin Laden raid and leak to the world the details \u2014 knowing as he did that bin Laden\u2019s death was not his trophy alone (or indeed a trophy at all) \u2014 but better left an unspoken collective effort of military bravery and the dividend of the often derided Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols that Obama had both damned and then embraced. Ironically (another good Greek word), it was probably not so much an obscure video, but the constant chest-thumping about the grisly end of Osama that infuriated the al-Qaeda affiliates. Nothing, after all, is quite so dangerous as talking loudly while carrying a small stick. Because Obama now cannot explain how his staff and subordinates watched a real-time video and\u00a0did not react<\/a>[1]\u00a0as most Americans would have responded, he is saddled with a long, drawn-out tragic dilemma \u2014 knowing that the predetermined end will prove bad and so avoiding it brings only temporary relief. Americans can deal with stormed embassies and lost ambassadors \u2014 but not their commander in chief of the world\u2019s most deadly military watching real-time videos of the carnage before going to bed to prep for a campaign stop in Las Vegas (a city Obama himself once preached\u00a0should be avoided<\/a>[2]). Either an administration discloses or does not disclose \u2014 but why, the public will ask, leak the covert details of the cyber-war against Iran, the Osama mission, and the Predator hit protocols, but not inform the public how our own were murdered? All that is\u00a0hubris<\/em>\u00a0and simply asks too much of the public.<\/p>\n Then we come to Vice President Joe Biden, who serially bragged about the president\u2019s bold decision to go after bin Laden. He clearly lied in his debate with Paul Ryan\u00a0when he asserted that<\/a>[3]\u00a0\u201cwe weren\u2019t told they wanted more security there. We did not know they wanted more security again\u201d \u2014 given all the contradicting evidence of direct appeals from the consulate and ambassador. Yet Biden sadly has became a sort of comedic court jester rather than a tragic figure. As a candidate,\u00a0he made racial slurs<\/a>[4]\u00a0about the president and crudely joked about\u00a0immigrants from India<\/a>[5]\u00a0\u2014 and thought FDR addressed the nation\u00a0on television as president in 1929.<\/a>[6] Then as vice president, Biden has accused his opponents of wanting to reinstate the shackles of slavery, is chronically confused about what state he is in at any given time, and\u00a0blurts out weird things<\/a>[7]\u00a0that suggest mental confusion. So ironically, of all the characters of the Libyan tragedy, Biden by his very buffoonery is alone exempt from criticism: we expect him not to tell the truth about the consulate, because he cannot distinguish the truth about almost anything. He is a jester, an entertainer, not a serious person from whom we expect veracity. \u00a0\u201cThat\u2019s just old Joe being old Joe\u201d means that Biden can say almost anything untrue about Libya and no one cares. That Joe \u201cput y\u2019all back in chains\u201d Biden is vice president should itself be tragic, but so far it has proved more a comic farce.<\/p>\n For Secretary of State Clinton, her awkward tenure at State was nearing a suitable end \u2014 at least from the point of view of her reviving her dormant political agenda. Whether the president won or lost in 2012 would have no bearing on her 2016 presidential ambitions. Whether she left nobly or under a cloud most certainly would. Despite the downside of her job \u2014 outflanked by regional czars, her political independence forfeited, and her spouse\u2019s vast income curtailed \u2014 for four years Hillary had kept in the news and largely navigated the Obama labyrinth on a safe course for 2016.<\/p>\n Perhaps no longer. For still largely unknown reasons, she or her staff ignored repeated, clear, and detailed prior warnings that the consulate and embassy were vulnerable \u2014 and largely defenseless against just the sort of attacks that would kill the ambassador. To the degree we have versions of some of the ambassador\u2019s cables, the warnings all read hauntingly prescient. After the attack commenced, the State Department froze and went into a figurative fetal position \u2014 either assuming the CIA would protect the consulate, or that the Obama successful Libyan narrative should not be endangered by a full-scale Black Hawk Down intervention. Or it was fed by vain hopes that someone, somehow would make it all just go away.\u00a0\u201cTwisting \u2014 slowly twisting in the wind\u201d<\/a>[8]\u00a0was John Ehrlichman\u2019s Watergate sick parlance to describe the cruel Nixon administration treatment of former FBI head Patrick Gray, but it also describes well enough Hillary\u2019s next 90 days or so on the job. She is in a tragic dilemma: she wants to leave the Obama mess but cannot as long as she suspects that only her continued presence on the job wards off administration efforts to make her a fall person.<\/p>\n Susan Rice and James Clapper are minor, insignificant figures, but ones who both tested\u00a0nemesis<\/em>\u00a0one too many times. The former helped dream up the Libyan intervention, along with Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton (would that Hillary could now take back that crude boast,\u00a0\u201cWe came, we saw, Gaddafi died\u201d<\/a>[9]). Rice was eager that her previous behind-the-scenes labors should receive due credit on the eve of the exit of Secretary Clinton. She got her chance with Libya, played it to the full, and sadly made a fool of herself. She could have fairly summed up what the administration did not know, and done so perhaps once or twice on television. But perhaps her\u00a0hubris<\/em>\u00a0drove her to spin an elaborate scenario of protestors mad over an uncouth video \u2014 and not once, but emphatically five times on a single Sunday. If an investigation follows, she will probably identify those who provided her with such narratives that simply could not be true, and were known to be untrue at the time.<\/p>\n James Clapper, in terms of Washington rules, had gotten away with quite a lot. He was a Bush appointee promoted by the new administration, after making the necessary adjustments that such a transformation requires. He seemed strangely clueless on television when told of a foiled London terrorist operation. He almost alone claimed that Gaddafi would not fall. He even more singularly assured us that the Muslim Brotherhood was secular. And he somehow trumped all of that by promulgating the Muslim anger over a video narrative \u2014 despite a drone video sending back real-time film of a terrorist attack. How he had so far avoided\u00a0nemesis<\/em>\u00a0is a mystery, but it is no mystery that he will no longer avoid it.<\/p>\n David Petraeus is in a classically tragic role \u2014 the sole character who combined sterling intelligence and military expertise that would seem to have been critical in responding to just this sort of terrorist assault. \u00a0At first report, the only uplifting element of the entire debacle seems to have been incomplete reports of some CIA and private contractor help sent to the consulate, and then a tardy CIA posse dispatched to the annex. But those facts are lost amid rumors and leaks that the intelligence community is also culpable (why would a private contractor have to disobey CIA orders in order to attempt to save an ambassador?) \u2014 both in not predicting the danger (or not listening to those who did) and in not addressing the attack at the embassy properly, and in not publicly providing answers to public concern.<\/p>\n Of course, Petraeus also must have known when he selflessly took the job that he was descending from Olympus to assume control of a bureau infamous for tarnishing the reputations of almost all who had tried to harness it \u2014 an agency whose failures surface in the media, but whose successes usually remain classified, and whose director\u00a0during scandal and catastrophe\u00a0is usually the first to be blamed and last to be\u00a0exonerated. In a fair world, perhaps Petraeus, not Martin Dempsey, should have been chairman of the Joint Chiefs, given his salvation of Iraq. Instead, he was dispatched to a difficult mission in Afghanistan and asked to restore calm, but without a desperate George W. Bush as his commander in chief, willing to wage all to reclaim a nearly lost war. From what little we know so far, Petraeus was not necessarily culpable for providing too little security or sending too little help when the consulate was attacked, but from deliberate leaks a narrative seems to be emerging that he should be held culpable for something. Yet in a larger sense, we know that principled people who go to work for this administration often do not end up well \u2014 and so wonder to what degree Petraeus himself is in a position to concede that dilemma, and the consequences to come when the final act of the tragedy of Libya will be at last fully aired.<\/p>\n URLs in the Post:<\/p>\n [1] did not react:\u00a0http:\/\/pjmedia.com\/claudiarosett\/benghazi-and-the-missing-obama-911-timeline<\/a> \u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media What separated the great Athenian tragedian Sophocles from dozens of his contemporaries \u2014 now mere names attached to fragments and quotations \u2014 were his unmatched characters, an Ajax, Antigone, or Oedipus whose proverbially fatal flaws ultimately led to their own self-destruction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[150],"tags":[176,12,1029,1053,1028,186,183,1048,184,110],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-5U","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12721,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/will-trump-ride-off-into-the-sunset\/","url_meta":{"origin":366,"position":0},"title":"Will Trump Ride Off Into the Sunset?","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 13, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ The Patriot Post I once wrote that whenever Donald Trump exits office, he will likely leave as a \u201ctragic hero.\u201d Over two millennia ago, the Athenian tragedian Sophocles first described the archetype in his portraits of an angry and old but still fearsome Ajax, and heroic\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2779,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/john-ford-and-the-republicans\/","url_meta":{"origin":366,"position":1},"title":"John Ford and the Republicans","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 17, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner There has been lots of discussion about David Brooks\u2019s suggestion that the John Ford Western was about community and order \u2014 and that this serves as a timely message for the out-in-the-wilderness Republicans to put less emphasis on rugged individualism and more on a\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "May 2009"","block_context":{"text":"May 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/may-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":11144,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/donald-trump-tragic-hero\/","url_meta":{"origin":366,"position":2},"title":"Donald Trump, Tragic Hero","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 16, 2018","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review His very flaws may be his strengths The very idea that Donald Trump could, even in a perverse way, be heroic may appall half the country. Nonetheless, one way of understanding both Trump\u2019s personal excesses and his accomplishments is that his not being traditionally\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Donald Trump"","block_context":{"text":"Donald Trump","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/donald-trump\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5926,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-benghazi-becoming-a-watergate-or-iran-contra-or-both\/","url_meta":{"origin":366,"position":3},"title":"Is Benghazi Becoming a Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or Both?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 6, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Benghazi cannot be dismissed with \u201clong ago\u201d or \u201cwhat difference does it make\u201d exasperation, given it may have the cover-up and civil-liberties aspects of Watergate and the weapon-transfers and foreign-policy implications of Iran-Contra. 1. Can a State Department be credible that on its own\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Benghazi"","block_context":{"text":"Benghazi","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/benghazi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7272,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-truth-drips-out\/","url_meta":{"origin":366,"position":4},"title":"The Truth Drips Out","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 1, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ NRO's The Corner\u00a0 For over a year and a half the White House successfully withheld communications between public servants, apparently in hopes that the death of four Americans in Benghazi would not become an issue in the 2012 election (at the eleventh hour CNN\u2019s Candy\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Benghazi"","block_context":{"text":"Benghazi","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/benghazi\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5944,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-tainted-campaign\/","url_meta":{"origin":366,"position":5},"title":"A Tainted Campaign?","author":"victorhanson","date":"May 14, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner If it is proven that the IRS\u00a0thwarted some groups from obtaining tax-exempt status in fear that their traditional or\u00a0conservative messages might hurt the 2012 Obama campaign (especially if it did so under pressure from White House-affiliated operatives),\u00a0and if it is\u00a0proven that the Obama administration\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Retrospective"","block_context":{"text":"Retrospective","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/retrospective\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":367,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions\/367"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nMeanwhile, Obama would continue to bask in the removal of Gaddafi, but shirk the hard, dirty work of securing the\u00a0post bellum<\/em>\u00a0tribal landscape. Chaos on the ground in Libya logically ensued \u2014 and yet was ignored, as the intervention had to be frozen in amber as an ideal operation. That narrative was again ironic, given that Obama had been among the most vocal in pointing out the vast abyss from George W. Bush\u2019s \u201cMission Accomplished\u201d to the Iraq insurgency.<\/p>\n
\n
\n[2] should be avoided:\u00a0http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/news\/worldnews\/barackobama\/7149616\/Barack-Obama-tells-Americans-dont-go-to-Las-Vegas.html<\/a>
\n[3] when he asserted that:\u00a0http:\/\/www.foxnews.com\/politics\/2012\/10\/12\/white-house-moves-to-insulate-biden-obama-on-libya-security-question<\/a>
\n[4] he made racial slurs:\u00a0http:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2007\/POLITICS\/01\/31\/biden.obama<\/a>
\n[5] immigrants from India:\u00a0http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=sM19YOqs7hU<\/a>
\n[6] on television as president in 1929.:\u00a0http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=QnKcRo8DNYY<\/a>
\n[7] blurts out weird things:\u00a0http:\/\/www.powerlineblog.com\/archives\/2012\/11\/president-who.php<\/a>
\n[8] \u201cTwisting \u2014 slowly twisting in the wind\u201d:\u00a0http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=4731656<\/a>
\n[9] \u201cWe came, we saw, Gaddafi died\u201d:\u00a0http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=Fgcd1ghag5Y<\/a><\/p>\n