Benghazi!: A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink (Chorin, Ethan)

Notes from relevant books on Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, Defence, Development and Humanitarian Action.

Chorin, Ethan. Benghazi!: A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America and its World to the Brink. Hachette Books, 2022.

These are my personal notes from this book. They try to give a general idea of its content, but do not in any case replace reading the actual book. Think of them as teasers to encourage you to read further!

PART I Pieces of a Puzzle

1. Setting Up Blowback

“When you decide to go to war against your current main enemy, take a good, long look at the people behind you whom you choose as your friends, allies or mercenary fighters. Look well to see whether these allies already have unsheathed their daggers—and are pointing them at your back.”

Libyan Arabs were a much smaller number, but they grew to be some of Al Qaeda’s smartest, best, and most committed.

evolution of Islamism in Libya, a tragic history wrapped up in the dark psychological universe of one man: Muammar Gaddafi.

so poor at the time that its main source of income for years was the sale of livestock and scrap metal left over from the war.

Khartoum. There, in 1995, Abdulhakim Belhaj formalized the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, or LIFG, with himself as its leader, or emir. The LIFG’s relationship with Al Qaeda was never explicit—

The LIFG leadership mixed with other Libyan Islamists in Sudan who would become important to their story in years to come, like Ali Sallabi, one of three Libyan brothers strongly connected to the Muslim Brotherhood and based in the Arabian Gulf emirate of Qatar.

Gaddafi ordered large swathes of the Green Mountains outside Benghazi napalmed to destroy and expose LIFG hideouts.

2. Flipping a Rogue

For it is a well-known observation—a phenomenon known as the Tocqueville effect, for the philosopher’s observations on the French Revolution—that revolutions tend to happen not when things are getting worse, but when things are looking up and people realize that there are other realities.

3. The Dark Side of the Moon

In the Neocons’ calculus, Iraq was about making the Arab-Muslim world respect and fear American power. Democracy promotion was tacked on after the fact to make that idea sound more noble.

Two weeks after 9/ 11, President Bush signed an order freezing LIFG assets in the United States. By 2000, the LIFG had become the most significant of Al Qaeda’s allies.

So, a deal within a deal was struck: Gaddafi would provide the United States with a list of his most wanted Islamist enemies—essentially a Who’s Who of the LIFG leadership. The US and UK intelligence services would track them down and deliver them back to Libya for interrogation and torture, with the objective of getting information on bin Laden and Al Qaeda.

So while the United States was framing the deal with Libya as a step toward reform and democracy promotion, behind the scenes it was violating the basic human rights of suspected terrorists in pursuit of information on bin Laden’s future plans.

Abdulhakim Belhaj stands at the heart of the Libyan rendition story, its most prominent victim—and, ultimately, perhaps its most prominent beneficiary.

facilitate the LIFG’s claim to have traded violence for the ballot box.

Malaysians opted to put Belhaj and his wife, Fatima Boudchar, on a flight to Bangkok, Thailand, where they were ensnared in a joint CIA–MI6 operation.

Human Rights Watch confirmed that Belhaj’s pregnant wife was also stripped and subjected to degrading treatment,

Khalid al-Sherif, who went to Afghanistan with Belhaj in 1988 and became his deputy, was arrested in Peshawar, Pakistan, in 2003 by Pakistani intelligence and detained for two years in Afghanistan, where he says he was subject to similarly horrifying torture,

The Moroccan government linked the LIFG to terrorist bombings in Casablanca in 2003, in which forty-five people were killed. Spanish authorities linked the LIFG—and Abdulhakim Belhaj specifically—to the March 11, 2004, Madrid train bombings, which killed 193 and injured over 2,000.

Nor was democracy the antidote: when given the chance, political Islam was adept at using elections to its own advantage.

Muslim Brotherhood started to look like the best of a thin pool of options.

“Asked… if he expected a comparable success in the next elections, the Brotherhood’s general guide [leader] said he was not sure, because last time ‘State Security gave us a list of districts to run in, and promised to let us win in most. They have not contacted us so far about next year.’”

meeting of US intelligence officials to discuss the pros and cons of new overtures to the Brotherhood, which in turn led to informal meetings

2003, Qatar offered to host US forward military facilities in the region, absorbing forces withdrawn from Saudi Arabia.

These two developments—America’s resort to wide-scale kidnapping and torture of the LIFG and its incautious (or not fully considered) alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood—are rarely mentioned in the context of America’s continuing misadventures in the Middle East.

the heart of why the 2011 intervention in Libya failed so miserably, and why the US Mission in Benghazi was attacked in 2012.

4. City of Light and Darkness

Gaddafi grew to detest the city of Benghazi and directly and indirectly tried to undermine it.

Benghazi was, increasingly, a city in a low-level state of revolt—a situation that fed the Islamist infiltration,

1998, more than 400 infants at several Benghazi-area hospitals contracted HIV,

another atrocity, this one committed two years before, in 1996. A riot had broken out at Gaddafi’s notorious Tripoli Abu Salim prison,

alleged order by Gaddafi’s then head of internal security, Abdullah Senussi, to systematically gun down about 1,250 people

dramatic event that took place in Benghazi on February 17, 2006. A crowd had gathered in Benghazi near the Italian Consulate to protest the publication of cartoons insulting to the Prophet Mohammed in a Danish newspaper.

2006 protests got out of hand, setting the Italian Consulate on fire, and morphed into an attack on the Gaddafi regime, spreading across parts of Benghazi and into the towns of the Green Mountains.

5. Die Hard in Derna

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited Libya in early September 2008, to fulfill a Bush administration commitment to send a senior representative to mark full normalization of relations.

meetings with Gaddafi were always odd. But with Rice, whom he referred to as “my African princess,” Gaddafi reportedly outdid himself. He made her wait for hours, as he did most important guests, refused to shake her hand, and presented her with a music video he had commissioned in her honor, entitled “Black Flower in the White House.”

convinced that Gaddafi was a lunatic,

Sinjar Records, which showed a much greater rate of participation by Libyan radicals in Al Qaeda than anyone suspected.

United States might have easily demonstrated such concern by pressuring the regime to release Libya’s best-known dissident, Fathi el-Jahmi,

6. The Corrections

The first was the capture and delivery of the LIFG leadership-in-exile to Gaddafi for torture (although much of the torture seems to have been done by the United States, not the Libyans).

second installment in this saga was even more bizarre, as it involved the Libyans, apparently with US support, spending years trying to “flip” the LIFG away from violent jihad,

may have seen a deal with the LIFG as a means to a potentially lasting truce.

reach out, via Saif Gaddafi, to the families of the victims of the Abu Salim massacre—many of whom were LIFG—offering them some confirmation

leaders of Qatar and Turkey convinced Saif that the Muslim Brotherhood could help solve two of his biggest problems: they could help assure his succession and take care of the problem of Islamic radicalism.

Saif Gaddafi contacted Ali Sallabi, Libya’s most visible Muslim Brotherhood–linked figure, then living in Qatar.

idea of a public accommodation between the LIFG and its archenemy, the Gaddafi regime, started to take shape.

By 2010, the 417-page Corrective Studies in Understanding Jihad, Accountability, and the Judgment of the People, or the Corrections for short (muraja’at in Arabic), was done.

released LIFG leaders Abdulhakim Belhaj, Sami al-Saadi, and Khalid al-Sherif from Abu Salim prison; 170 more Muslim Brotherhood prisoners were released the same year.

In the following years, neither the renditions nor the Corrections got much attention.

They are at the heart of why the US intervention in Libya failed, and part of why and how the US Mission was attacked on September 11, 2012.

PART II Risky Business

7. Fear and Loathing in Washington

The president needed a team that could make decisions and produce those answers on the fly, in a manner that took the president’s political interests directly into consideration. The NSC was particularly well suited

“without more control by the NSC, the President would be exposed… to the whims of the capricious news cycle, supercharged by social media.”

main offensive tool at the NSC’s disposal was narrative—a proactive articulation of policy that anticipated and deflected attacks while

Rhodes, then thirty-two, joined the NSC as deputy national security advisor for strategic communications,

They did not have experience in power and were not specialists in foreign policy (apart from Samantha Power), but were rather political advisors, attentive to the domestic repercussions of international affairs—the danger of the instrumentalization of the terrorist menace.”

main danger was that communications and legal concerns would wind up driving policy rather than the reverse.

attempt to fend off an explosion of political attacks, the Obama administration was also keeping out some of the expertise that was absolutely necessary if the president were to avoid the same kinds of mistakes that his predecessors had made.

United States’ ability to deal with complex foreign policy challenges had been greatly reduced.

8. Goodwill Hunting

Dr. Peter Mandaville was one of a few academics who contributed to the Obama administration’s stance on Islamism,

Lynch published a paper meant to highlight unrealistic views of the Brotherhood.

On one extreme, Lynch argued, was the idea of the Brotherhood as a “firewall” against Islamic radicalism:

On the other extreme is the idea of the Brotherhood as an “escalator”: People join with a potentially moderate political outlook but are taken away on a fixed path toward violent extremism.

study on political Islam, known widely as the Cameron Report.

9. The 51/49 Decision

Members of the Brotherhood’s international leadership held a meeting in Zurich in late January, in which they concluded that popular upheaval was coming to Libya, and that the regime would respond violently.

Meanwhile, the Islamists assembled their own competing brain trust, the February 17 Coalition, or I’tilaf for short.

Muslim Brotherhood and former LIFG members offered to help the regime calm the protests.

On February 22, Muammar Gaddafi delivered his infamous “zenga zenga” speech, in which he spoke of cleansing the country of traitors, dar, dar (house by house), zenga, zenga (alley by alley)…

At the eleventh hour, the president’s senior advisors were split down the middle about whether or not to intervene in Libya.

But he was troubled by the fact that US forces in the region were already overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps more to the point, he believed that the United States didn’t do interventions well. Further, interventions had a way of inevitably surpassing their initial objectives and entering into mission creep.

Clinton focused on two questions:

·      First, was this a genuine popular uprising or an Islamist takeover in the making?

·      Second, were the rebels—the opponents to Gaddafi, the ones camped out in the Benghazi courthouse—reliable?

“There were few experts on Libya either in or out of government. We had not grasped how weak its institutions were or appreciated the internal disunity that, as Robert D. Kaplan explains, was the ‘underlying cause behind Qaddafi’s [sic] unruly tyranny.’”

circle of expert advisors was still narrow, if not self-referential

2009 Wikileaks release of more than 200,000 US classified cables included an unflattering profile of Gaddafi written by Ambassador Cretz, in which he referenced Gaddafi’s relationship with his “voluptuous” nurse and described a number of Gaddafi’s phobias. That cable resulted in threats to senior Embassy personnel and resulted in Cretz’s recall back to the States in 2010.

Clinton took another meeting at her hotel. French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy,

decision shaped by domestic politics: the ever-present desire by the Democrats, and the Obama administration in particular, to deflect and dodge right-wing political traps;

 10. Expeditionary Diplomat

“expeditionary diplomacy” to refer to short-term diplomatic missions in support of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Clinton argued that forward deployments of diplomatic expertise would pay off in the longer term, resulting in fewer and shorter conflicts—hence “smart” power.

Clinton set up the Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations,

worked in real time to design strategies and tools for dealing with localized security challenges,

biggest obstacle to the application of smart power in the Obama administration was the politics of risk.

You can’t separate diplomacy from risk. It’s part of the job. People don’t realize this, but our diplomats take huge risks all the time—

He hitched a ride on a Greek freighter departing Valetta, Malta, for Benghazi, along with a small contingent of DS officers and a junior political assistant—none of whom had been to Benghazi before.

Jake Sullivan, then head of policy planning at the State Department (effectively Clinton’s policy advisor), advised the NSC that “post-conflict stabilization in Libya, while clearly a worthy undertaking at the right level of investment, cannot be counted on as one of our highest priorities.” In another email, Sullivan was more blunt: “Libya must not,” he wrote, “be a state-building exercise.” Clearly the White House, the State Department, and its anointed Libya expert were on different pages with regard to what Libya required.

he felt like the American Consul William Eaton marching on Derna in 1805.

In 1803, one of these frigates, the USS Philadelphia, ran aground on an unmarked shoal. The pasha of Tripoli, Yusuf Karamanli, suddenly had 308 American hostages, whom he locked up in the former US Consulate, in what is today Libya’s old city. Enter William Eaton, Revolutionary privateer-turned-adventurer-spy,

scheme to overthrow the pasha and install the malleable Hamet in his place. It was America’s first attempt at regime change, a habit still going strong by 2011.

march with him on foot across the Egyptian desert, where he hoped to raise more recruits to march on Tripoli. Amazingly, Eaton made all this happen on sheer guts, bluffs, and self-confidence. He took Derna and was ready to continue on to Tripoli when he was summoned onto a frigate by the head of the US Mediterranean command, thanked for his service, and told to go home. Faced with Eaton’s threat, the pasha had sued for peace, and the Americans accepted, leaving Hamet and his followers to the wrath of the pasha’s forces (in the end, the pasha spared his brother). Eaton himself returned home an angry and broken man, arguing that Washington had been cautious to its own detriment and that the Barbary pirates would rise again (which they did).

 11. Arming the Radicals

Gaddafi may have suffered a significant loss, but he held western Libya, and was putting up a strong fight.

The progressives had grouped around Jibril and the leading regime defectors. The Islamists quickly coalesced around the LIFG and Muslim Brotherhood figures that had dominated the negotiations with Gaddafi over the previous years. There were revolutionary figures with political aspirations of their own, such as Khalifa Heftar, Gaddafi’s former general and the commander of his war on Chad. And there were still Gaddafi loyalists whose fervor suggested they believed Gaddafi might reappear like some kind of messiah.

Bukatif had recently started to form the Muslim Brotherhood–affiliated February 17 Martyrs Brigade with assistance from the LIFG (which, though disbanded by the Corrections, was replaced by the Libyan Islamic Movement for Change). The United States would later hire the February 17 Martyrs Brigade to protect American diplomats while they were in Benghazi.

Qatar had shifted its supply routes from the NTC and its representatives to Abdulhakim Belhaj,

Meanwhile, an international team of counterterrorism experts, led by two French research outfits, was on the ground in Libya collecting information for a report released in May, which argued that the Western intervention in Libya, and heavily arming radical Islamists in Benghazi, strongly risked “destabilizing all of North Africa and the Sahel, lending itself to the creation of a new home for radical Islam, and terrorism.”

Qatar appeared to be focusing their weapons shipments not on the NTC, but on their friends’ militias from Misrata and their associated Islamist groups—

 12. The Good-Hearted Bookseller

Abdel Fattah Younes, the commander of the Libyan revolutionary forces, had been assassinated in Benghazi.

article in Foreign Policy titled “Benghazi Blues.”

Belhaj to the front of Gaddafi’s Bab Al Aziziya (Beloved Gate) compound, where Belhaj made a statement before a bank of Al Jazeera TV cameras, in the same spot that Gaddafi had issued his infamous “zenga zenga” speech.

 13. The Fall

Gaddafi’s tormentors sodomized, then killed him, then put his and his son Mutassim’s bodies on gruesome display in a Misratan meat locker.

October 18, less than a month after the fall of Tripoli, Secretary of State Clinton flew in a military plane from Malta to Tripoli, to meet with Jibril and other representatives of the new transitional government, which had just relocated from Benghazi.

“We came, we saw, he died,”

Belhaj traveled to Syria, via Istanbul, to meet with representatives from the Free Libyan Army. With him was his deputy, Mahdi Harati, an Irish-Libyan Islamist commander.

deep association between Libyan and Syrian Islamist rebels.

Saif is heard warning his captors about his former Islamist allies: “You’re in the valley I was in, climbing to the top of the mountain, where you will see the bigger picture—they’ll betray you as they betrayed me.”

Zintanis were among the better options. Though not sympathetic to the Gaddafi regime, they were suspicious of foreign influence in the evolving conflict,

media bathed in the irony of Western intelligence agencies having to digest the idea that they now might have to collaborate with their former victims.

French-language biography carried the change-affirming title From Jihad to the Polls.

Belhaj won the right to sue the former UK foreign secretary and the ex-head of counterterrorism at the MI6, as well as the two agencies themselves, over their torture and rendition.

Back in Washington, many were starting to look at Libya with serious buyer’s remorse. With the potential for yet another failed state following an American military intervention, the Americans were facing the costs of committing to a situation it still only partly understood.

media started to look more favorably on the LIFG—

absurdity of the flip-flopping interactions involving the United States, Britain, Muammar Gaddafi, the LIFG, and the Muslim Brotherhood from the 1980s to the 2011 intervention, and beyond.

 14. The Ides of February

Senator John McCain was back in Tripoli—on his third trip to Libya since the start of the revolution.

senator came up with an unusual request: he wanted to meet Abdulhakim Belhaj,

McCain issued a rather remarkable apology: “As an elected representative of my country,” he said, “I apologize for what happened, for the way you and your wife were treated, and for all you suffered because of it.”

 15. On the Eve of the Attack

Senior management officers at the State Department were aware of the security reports but explicitly told the Embassy not to press the point as their requests would be denied.

The number of State Department security agents assigned to the Embassy in Tripoli dropped suddenly from thirty-four to six.

As of September 9, the day before Chris’s arrival to Benghazi, the Feb 17 guards had effectively gone on strike, saying they would no longer provide protection for any travel by US personnel outside the Benghazi Mission.

Some US government officials were aware that Al Qaeda was actively scouting out Benghazi as a node for its expansion within Libya.

had arranged to open an “American Corner”—the kind of small library that had been first proposed back in 2005, within an English language school run by Habib.

Unbeknownst to Stevens or anyone else at the mission, Al Qaeda’s leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri posted a message during the day to Al Qaeda’s networks, announcing the death of his number two in Al Qaeda, Mohammed Hassan Al Qaid, and calling for revenge: “I proudly announce to the Muslim ummah [community] and to the mujahideen… the news of the martyrdom of the lion of Libya, Sheikh Hassan Mohammed Qaed… his blood urges you and incites you to fight and kill the crusaders.”

The timing of Al-Zawahiri’s statement is curious, and potentially important, as Al Qaid was killed several months before,

PART III The Attack and the Scandal

 17. Cairo

The video in question was a fourteen-minute movie trailer for a film titled Innocence of Muslims, produced by a Los Angeles–based Coptic Christian from Egypt named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula (who uploaded the video under the alias “Sam Bacile”). Nakoula had a criminal history and an abiding hatred for Muslims.

Florida pastor Terry Jones, infamous for his public burning of the Koran in 2011, which was cited as the cause for a mob attack on a UN compound in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, that killed seven UN employees.

US Embassy not far from Tahrir Square, the focal point of the Egyptian Revolution, chanting “Down, Down America! Obama, Obama, We Are All Osama!” At one point, several in the crowd scaled the meters-high retaining wall, pulled down an American flag, set it alight, and hoisted a black Islamist flag in its place.

The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims… We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others. The Embassy also tweeted the message later, despite the fact that the State Department had expressed objections to the wording.

 18. “We Were Drinking Tea”

attackers advanced “unimpeded” into the compound (i.e., the Feb 17 guards had fled),

 19. Witnesses Huddle

there were anomalies that suggested the situation might be more complex than it seemed.

·      First, there was the matter of the timing of the release of the video in Arabic—which couldn’t have been better, if someone or some group wanted to generate mass protests to coincide with the anniversary of 9/ 11.

·      Second was the fact that Ayman Al-Zawahiri posted a statement on September 10, the day before the attack, encouraging his followers to avenge the death of one the most prominent of the Afghan Libyans, and his number two within Al Qaeda, Abu Yahya Al Libi, who was killed in Pakistan three months earlier by an American drone.

·      Third, there are multiple indications that the Cairo protests were themselves planned in advance,

·      And fourth were the strange signs of impending trouble in Benghazi preceding the attack,

both Ansar al-Sharia branches in Libya—Ansar al-Sharia Benghazi and Ansar al-Sharia Derna—coordinated the Benghazi attack.

Wednesday, September 12, there was a limited attack on the US Embassy in the Tunisian capital of Tunis. Two days later, on Friday, September 14, hundreds of militants staged a much larger attack on the Embassy and an American school nearby.

an angry crowd of more than a hundred people appeared outside the US Embassy in the Yemeni capital of Sana’a,

US Embassy in Sudan was attacked on September 14.

Benghazi may have been part of a larger, loosely-coordinated set of commando-style actions that occurred in the shadow of the video, and which were encouraged, if not directed, by the highest levels of Al Qaeda.

 20. Romney’s Lunge

Clinton pushed it to her policy advisor Jake Sullivan: “Be sure Ben [Rhodes] knows they need to be ready for this line of attack,” she wrote.

 21. The Talking Points Debacle

CIA originated the idea about the attack resulting spontaneously from a protest against the video.

 22. Stuck with the Story

told the Senate Homeland Security Committee that Stevens and three other Americans “were killed in the course of a terrorist attack on our embassy.”

 23. Collateral Damage

irritant around which the Benghazi scandal oyster would form a pearl.

McCain started to characterize the administration’s response as “either willful ignorance or abysmal intelligence” and “either a massive cover-up or incompetence.”

Rice wasn’t going to be confirmed by the Senate because Republicans blamed her for the talking points controversy,

 24. Investigations Galore

Mokhtar Belmokhtar, who had been a leader of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), started his own terrorist group Al Mourabitoun in 2012 and, four months after the Benghazi attack, staged a major attack on an Algerian gas

Benghazi-based franchise of Ansar al-Sharia, but also the Derna-based Ansar al-Sharia franchise, headed by Abu Sufian Bin Qumu.

25. Stand-Down Orders

“stand-down orders” controversy.

the Department of Defense typically activates a Foreign Emergency Support Team (FEST), an “interagency, on-call, short-notice team poised to respond to terrorist incidents worldwide”; the FEST is meant to be dispatched within four hours of deployment orders, “providing the fastest assistance possible.” FESTs had responded to the 1998 East Africa bombings and the 2000 USS Cole attack, among others. Another option was something called a Fleet Anti-Terrorism Security Team (FAST), which has more direct tactical hit capacity. There’s also the Commander’s In-extremis Force (CIF), a group trained to provide quick logistical solutions in crises, including rescuing US personnel under threat.

Panetta authorized the dispatch of two FAST platoons stationed in Rota, Spain,

“There’s a lot of Monday-morning quarterbacking going on here,” Secretary Panetta told reporters at the Pentagon the day Fox News released its story alleging CIA stand-down orders. He added that “the basic principle is that you don’t deploy forces into harm’s way without knowing what’s going on, without having some real-time information about what’s taking place.”

risk aversion played a major role in the decision-making.

system that was unprepared—and in many ways incapable—of reacting quickly

Because the Obama administration wanted to pass off the entire Libyan clean-up operation to the Europeans and our Arab allies, there were no US military assets on alert in the immediate vicinity, even at Souda Bay, Crete. The United States’ overall readiness posture was nothing like it had been during the Cold War, when military assets could be scrambled on a moment’s notice.

most of Clinton’s actions with respect to Libya, for better or worse, erred on the risk-tolerant side rather than the opposite.

 26. Paired Controversies: Benghazi and the Emails

Fox News, meanwhile, had “made Benghazi a permanent part of its programming,”

PART IV The World Benghazi Made

 27. Benghazi and the 2016 Election

The basic strategy was to attach Benghazi to Clinton personally as a marker of poor character, underpinned by long-term Republican narratives about the Clintons.

 28. The Damage Done to Libya

One of the first casualties of the Benghazi attack was the city of Benghazi itself.

Rhodes seems to have felt that Benghazi conformed to that unwritten rule that once the political costs approached a certain level, the United States would withdraw—regardless of any countervailing logic. And that’s what happened. Further, once the United States left Benghazi, other countries followed.

Italian Consulate was one of the few Western diplomatic missions that remained open

Thanks to armor plating on the cars, De Sanctis and his security team managed to escape.

The Italian Consulate closed, for the time being, leaving the city nearly devoid of any Western diplomatic presence and inviting

Robert Baer wrote in Time that Benghazi would be “disastrous for U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities in the Middle East,” and predicted that “the resultant siege mentality in Washington creates an imperative to pull American spies and diplomats back into fortresses, heavily defended U.S. sanctuaries from which it’s almost impossible to collect good human intelligence.”

Libya had become the unexpected focal point of America’s reaction to the Arab Spring;

“After Benghazi, what we could do in the Middle East was nothing short of catastrophic… [the attack] made it impossible to take risks, we withdrew from the Middle East, but most importantly, we are now blind in areas of the world where we need

Expeditionary diplomacy was predicated on the idea that diplomacy required a certain degree of risk-taking. And in one of Benghazi’s ironies, the attack that killed Stevens also killed both one of expeditionary diplomacy’s best exemplars and the ethos behind the approach.

how deeply US actions over the previous years, dating back to both the Bush-era extraordinary renditions of the LIFG leadership and the subsequent Corrections, had damaged the so-called progressives’ longer-term viability.

Too often in the past the responsibility to rebuild has been insufficiently recognized,

President Obama would famously tell New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman that one of his biggest regrets was the failure to plan for what came next in Benghazi. Secretary Clinton says she feels strongly, to this day, that Libya was a missed opportunity, and that the United States “could have done much more for the country.” So why didn’t we? The short answer is politics.

Ambassador Deborah Jones, who had previously served as US ambassador to Kuwait, was confirmed in the summer of 2013.

“For Libya, the Benghazi attack helped to push its delicate transitional process into a death spiral.”

William Burns, “The Benghazi tragedy and the endless political circus around it substantially lessened the administration’s appetite for deeper involvement in Libya.”

 29. Killing the Whispers (of a Strong Syria Policy)

president had challenged his NSC advisors to come up with a single example where the United States had supported an insurgency and it had been successful. When a counterexample wasn’t forthcoming, he declared the idea “half baked.”

 30. Back to Libya

General National Congress (GNC) declared in early 2014 that it was going to extend its mandate—unconstitutionally—past the date set for national elections the coming summer.

Heftar had been recruited by some of the Libyan opposition to return to the country but had lost out to General Abdel Fattah Younes.

Libya’s second national legislative elections were held in July.

The new government had intended to escape the extortive power of the Tripoli militias by relocating to Benghazi, but given the Islamist takeover of the city, it set up shop in the far eastern town of Tobruk.

recognized the House of Representatives as the legitimate representative of the Libyan people, a policy that some called, tellingly, “recognition without support.”

Facing a firefight at the US Embassy’s front door and having no viable contingency plan, Ambassador Deborah Jones decided on July 26 to evacuate US personnel. It was a move one of Jones’s ambassador colleagues called “the worst thing we [the United States] could have done for Libya’s stability.”

The ambition therefore was to create a government that might maintain minimal order—while authorizing foreign strikes against ISIS—and hope things worked out over time. The result was something called the Libyan Political Agreement (LPA), which aimed to fuse the two governments into a Byzantine structure

new Government of National Accord (GNA) was to take its electoral legitimacy from ratification by the last elected government, the House of Representatives (HOR).

Presidency Council would “assume the functions of the Supreme Commander of the Libyan army.”

international community unilaterally shifted its recognition from the HOR to the Government of National Unity, which hadn’t been ratified by the HOR as stipulated in the LPA.

inspiration from countries like Estonia, which had built its post-Soviet identity and economy on investment in e-government, which in his mind was key to managing Libya’s transition to democracy. “If a small corner of the former Soviet Union could do it, why can’t we? If Norway could insulate its oil wealth from politics, why can’t we?”

The intervention in Libya cost the United Statesmore than a billion dollars—nothing compared to the ultimate two-trillion-dollar price tag for the Iraq War—

 31. The World After Benghazi

American foreign policy is greatly—and unreasonably—shaped by what’s happening at home politically rather than what is in America’s long-term interests, or the interests of global stability.

Having failed to fulfill their fantasies and realize their power as saviors, the United States and its allies now seemed unable to recognize or value the progress that was actually occurring on the ground—

 32. Other Benghazis?

quite frankly, that’s not something that we want from our diplomats. It’s not something we want from our special operators. We want them to be aggressive. We want them to take risks.

Later in the first year of the Trump presidency, the media lobbed the “Benghazi” label at another incident involving the US military, this time on the Niger–Mali border.

Senior politicians in Washington claimed that they hadn’t been informed that US troops were in Niger to begin with.

Conclusion: Benghazi and the Brink

Benghazi is no longer just a scandal; it is an entry in the lexicon of scandal, shorthand for any kind of event that can be blown up for partisan advantage. It is a level of scandal by which we measure others.

a world in which America remains distracted, divided, and exhausted—and in which its adversaries and competitors exploit its hesitance to advance their own ambitions.

“FBI Uncovers Al-Qaeda Plot to Just Sit Back and Enjoy Collapse of United States.”

If there was an individual whose experience embodied the collision between America’s awesome capabilities and its supreme dysfunction, it was Chris Stevens.

Benghazi decisively ended the US experiment in Libya and condemned Libya to a proxy war between militias answering to more than ten countries. It also indicated to leaders like Russia’s Putin that America was reckless, indecisive, and self-absorbed all at the same time.

there is one investment that will always produce strong returns for society, and the US government: programs for study or service abroad (or in a different community