How Long Before Rice Goes Under the Bus?

Our Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice was making the news talk show rounds over the week-end giving out the administration's increasingly tired line that the attack in Libya was not planned or premeditated:

"We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to – or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo,” Rice said. “And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there."

I love Rice's use of the word "folks." So cozy and pleasing. So reassuring. The people who came to the mission in Benghazi to demonstrate were just "folks." They were not murdering, ungrateful, religious fanatics, no, they were just "folks." Ahhhh . . . I wonder if she would say the same about the people who made the video that supposedly set the whole thing off. I wonder if she would call them just "folks." No, probably not; she keeps referring to their video as "disgusting." She, by the way, does not use the same word for the lynching of Ambassador Stevens and three other Americans by the "folks."

Let me say a word about Ambassador Susan Rice. She has gone to all the right schools, and has all the right political connections. She is ruthlessly ambitious and is a bureaucratic bully. She is also not too bright when it comes to the substance of foreign affairs. I remember dealing with her during the Clinton administration when she was at the NSC handling African affairs. She cowed State's Assistant Secretary for African affairs into silence and rode right over the State Department. She would hold long and elaborate meetings, almost on a daily basis, to discuss African affairs, and her specialty was arriving very late. It was a power trip for the young Rice. She seemed to enjoy having senior people, especially military officers for whom she had special contempt, cooling their heels. She would arrive totally unprepared and then launch into long monologues that often made little sense and had little connection to reality on the ground. I will never forget one long meeting in which she argued for US intervention into what was then called Zaire (old Belgian Congo) to save the collapsing Mobutu regime for which she had a particular affection that made no sense. She presented a "plan" to set up a defensive line right down the middle of Zaire to prevent the rebels from advancing further west. She derided the military officers who tried to remind her of how enormous a country Zaire was, the sort of terrain that existed, and the sort of resources that it would take to do something as she was proposing. It was insanity.

Sorry for the trip down memory lane. Back to our current insanity . ..

The evidence, despite Rice's talk-a-thon and despite the State Department efforts to shut off the conversation, is coming in that the Benghazi attack was not just by "folks" out on a stroll. It was by committed Islamists out to destroy and murder. They had a well-developed plan, they had weapons, and they had good intel, and we had none of those things.

The Obamistas are caught in a web of lies. Yes, lies. There is no other word. If this were just a "spontaneous" eruption in response to a 14-minute video clip, then what is it exactly that we are investigating? Why are we apparently going to dispatch the FBI and drones? What are we looking for? Do we need high-tech spies in the sky to find just "folks" who were outraged? Will our intel and counter-terror efforts now be focused on finding anything that could lead to a "spontaneous" outburst by the "folks" in the Middle East? Are we going to be dispatching cops to haul in, say, movie makers who do something "offensive" to the "folks" in the Middle East? Nah, that's too extreme . . . we would never do that.

The Obamistas know the attack was planned; that our security in Benghazi was deplorable; that our security procedures, such as they were, were compromised; that the consulate in Benghazi should not have been open on 9/11, if at all; and that Ambassador Stevens should not have been there, especially on 9/11, and especially after what was happening in Cairo. In other words, State and NSC screwed up big time. The heads of both of those agencies should be on the chopping block, along with a host of other heads up and down the command chain at State and the NSC.

It will not be long before the administration has to abandon its current line and we will see emphasis on the resurgence of Al Qaeda. We will begin talking incessantly about the "small groups of extremists," even Rice hinted at the new line, who do this stuff over the objection of the "folks." The Libyan officials are already anticipating this line with their insistence that the whole thing was executed by "foreigners." The Obamistas will pivot to an argument that AQ did it, and that, of course, the people of country X are not to blame. Nobody will ever mention the real cause of all this murderous insanity, i.e., the nature of today's Islamic society and culture, and the refusal of leaders in that culture to seek to reform and enlighten it.

Our own refusal to see the truth will continue to get us killed.