The controversy over the attack on the US consulate inBenghazi, Libya, and the Obama administration’s response to it are being dumbeddown and overblown. Dumbed down because the focus is on word choice rather thansubstantive criticism of the administration’s handling of the incident;overblown because the administration’s critics are trying to make an argumentthat the facts don’t support.
In the weeks since the attack, the president’s critics havefocused their attention on his choice of words to characterise the incident, inparticular whether or not he called it an act of terror. There is a validsubstantive basis for questioning whether the president and his administrationintentionally avoided characterizing the attack as a terrorist act.
After all, the administration has invested a great amount ofpolitical capital in the electoral value of having “won” the war on terror. Ifits reluctance to explicitly acknowledge the premeditated nature of the attackon the Benghazi consulate was intentional and meant to preserve this campaignplank, it amounts to willful dishonesty, a punishable offense for anygovernment official. If it was unintentional, then there are some other validquestions to be asked about the administration’s crisis response and riskpreparedness procedures. But those targeting the president for his choice ofwords do so with a larger objective in mind: To implicitly call into questionhis administration’s record on countering global terrorist networks. Here, theyare pursuing a red herring.
Barack Obama has been ruthless “ some would say too ruthless“ in pursuing an “invisible war” against al-Qaida and its affiliates. As aresult of a withering campaign of US drone strikes, al-Qaida central is largelya shell of its former self in Afghanistan-Pakistan, and its local affiliate inYemen is suffering. In Somalia, Al Shabab is on the run “ the first good newsto come out of that troubled state in decades. What has emerged in the past twoyears, however, is a troubling new vector of Islamist radicalism in Libya andthe Sahel, where al-Qaida in the Islamic Maghreb and Islamist Tuareg militantshave taken advantage of the region’s large expanses of under-governed territoryto establish themselves.
First, it is important to emphasise that while all of thefactors feeding this growing threat have been exacerbated by the Arab Springand the NATO intervention in Libya, none of them were created by either event.The Obama administration is not responsible either for Islamist militancy ineastern Libya, which was already a major source of foreign fighters inUS-occupied Iraq, nor in northern Mali, where Tuareg nationalism had alreadybeen the cause of numerous armed uprisings.
It bears noting that many of the groups active in the regionare also engaged in lucrative transnational criminal activities such askidnapping and smuggling. Their extremist rhetoric is at times opportunistic,and must be understood in the context of their business interests. Second, theinsistence on calling the attack on Benghazi an act of terror might becounterproductive, in the sense that it could obscure a turning point in thelong war the United States has been waging in the region for the past decade.
In particular, it is necessary to distinguish betweenmilitancy and terrorism “ something Americans have no problem doing in regardto Colombian paramilitary groups, for example, but seem to find more difficultwhen it comes to radical Islamists.
Not every guy with a gun and a grievance is a terrorist.Those responsible for the attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi were operatinglocally, for largely local objectives, and they threaten neither Americans norAmerica. So while Americans should feel outraged by the attack, it would beabsurd for them to feel terrorised by it. Indeed, if anyone in eastern Libyashould be feeling terrorised these days it is those responsible for the attack.Judging from this administration’s record elsewhere, their days are numbered.
More broadly, the attack illustrates the way in which themetastasising of global terrorism has not resulted in a broader globalizationof strategic objectives, as was long feared. Instead, it has resulted in thecreation of transnational links through which tactical expertise and “brandlegitimacy” is shared, with the objectives remaining local.
Most importantly, though American interests are targeted andthreatened by these atomized local affiliates, the American homeland remainsbeyond their reach. Though this does not signal the end of the long war, itdoes mean that it is time to begin re-examining the adversaries that we arefacing, in particular by “deterrorizing” them.
In the aftermath of the Benghazi attack, the administrationwould have done well to make this point clear. Instead, its response and thepolitically motivated controversy it generated have obscured the largersignificance of the tragic events in Libya.
Judah Grunstein is editor in chief of World Politics Review,an online journal of global politics and geostrategic analysis
