The Benghazi Report Misses the Real Scandal of Libya

Ted Galen Carpenter

Security, Libya

Congress should have investigated the decision to go to war—and its serious consequences.

The much-anticipated report by the House Select Committee regarding the 2012 Benghazi incident in which U.S. ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed proved to be decidedly anti-climactic. Despite years of GOP partisan hype and the length of the report (some eight hundred pages), there was no “smoking gun” proving negligence on the part of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton or blatant deception on her part about the tragedy. The report, though, is a classic case of asking the wrong questions and, unsurprisingly, then getting meaningless answers.

What the committee members should have asked is what Ambassador Stevens and his staff were doing cavorting with Islamist militias in Benghazi in the first place. But that would have required a deep inquiry into an embarrassing fiasco of a Libya policy that many Republicans had also supported.

The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney has it right when he contends that the real Benghazi scandal was “Obama’s drive-by war” in Libya to overthrow Muammar Qaddafi. More correctly, it was Hillary Clinton’s war, since she was the principal architect of and lobbyist for the U.S.-led NATO intervention against Qaddafi.

As he had since the beginning of his rule some four decades earlier, Qaddafi relied heavily on support from the tribes in the western part of the country (especially in the area around Tripoli) to help keep him in power. Tribes in the sparsely populated southern region were far less favorably inclined. And most important, tribes in the eastern portion of the country (especially near the city of Benghazi) were overwhelmingly hostile to Qaddafi. Indeed, rebellions in the east had broken out several times during his rule.