Ron Paul: What No One Wants to Hear About Benghazi

Congressional hearings, White House damage
control, endless op-eds, accusations, and defensive denials. Controversy over
the events in Benghazi last September took center stage in Washington and
elsewhere last week. However, the whole discussion is again more of a
sideshow. Each side seeks to score political points instead of asking the
real questions about the attack on the US facility, which resulted in the
death of US Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.

Republicans smell a political opportunity over
evidence that the Administration heavily edited initial intelligence
community talking points about the attack to remove or soften anything that
might reflect badly on the president or the State Department.

Are we are supposed to be shocked by such
behavior? Are we supposed to forget that this kind of whitewashing of facts
is standard operating procedure when it comes to the US government?

Democrats in Congress have offered the even
less convincing explanation for Benghazi, that somehow the attack occurred
due to Republican sponsored cuts in the security budget at facilities
overseas. With a one trillion dollar military budget, it is hard to take this
seriously.

It appears that the Administration scrubbed
initial intelligence reports of references to extremist Islamist involvement
in the attacks, preferring to craft a lie that the demonstrations were a
spontaneous response to an anti-Islamic video that developed into a full-out
attack on the US outpost.

Who can blame the administration for wanting
to shift the focus? The Islamic radicals who attacked Benghazi were the same
people let loose by the US-led attack on Libya. They were the rebels on whose
behalf the US overthrew the Libyan government. Ambassador Stevens was slain
by the same Islamic radicals he personally assisted just over one year earlier.

But the Republicans in Congress also want to
shift the blame. They supported the Obama Administration’s policy of bombing
Libya and overthrowing its government. They also repeated the same
manufactured claims that Gaddafi was “killing his own people” and was about
to commit mass genocide if he were not stopped. Republicans want to draw
attention to the President’s editing talking points in hopes no one will
notice that if the attack on Libya they supported had not taken place,
Ambassador Stevens would be alive today.

Neither side wants to talk about the real
lesson of Benghazi: interventionism always carries with it unintended
consequences. The US attack on Libya led to the unleashing of Islamist
radicals in Libya. These radicals have destroyed the country, murdered
thousands, and killed the US ambassador. Some of these then turned their
attention to Mali which required another intervention by the US and France.

Previously secure weapons in Libya flooded the
region after the US attack, with many of them going to Islamist radicals who
make up the majority of those fighting to overthrow the government in Syria.
The US government has intervened in the Syrian conflict on behalf of the same
rebels it assisted in the Libya conflict, likely helping with the weapons
transfers. With word out that these rebels are mostly affiliated with al
Qaeda, the US is now intervening to persuade some factions of the Syrian
rebels to kill other factions before completing the task of ousting the
Syrian government. It is the dizzying cycle of interventionism.

The real lesson of Benghazi will not be
learned because neither Republicans nor Democrats want to hear it. But it is
our interventionist foreign policy and its unintended consequences that have
created these problems, including the attack and murder of Ambassador
Stevens. The disputed talking points and White House whitewashing are just a
sideshow.

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