OBAMA AND LIBYA, EGYPT (AND NOW YEMEN): NOT ONLY A TRAGEDY, BUT YET ANOTHER U.S. WAR?

Articles

Attacks on U.S. Embassies Not About a Movie

The Guilty Men Behind the Arab Winter

Libya: Not Just a Tragedy But the Start of Another Endless War for America
Storming Embassies, Killing Ambassadors, and ‘Smart’ Diplomacy

On Topic Links

Nakoula Basseley Claims Role In 'Innocence Of Muslims'

Mr. President, Mitt Romney Is Not the Enemy

‘You Knew the Media Were Going to Obsess on This and They Did’

Turmoil Over Contentious Video Spreads to Yemen and Iran

Muslim Brotherhood in the White House.pdf

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ATTACKS ON U.S. EMBASSIES WERE NOT ABOUT A MOVIE
Caroline Glick
Front Page Magazine, Sept 13, 2012

Here are a couple of facts:

On June 4 the White House confirmed that the US had killed Abu Yahya Al-Libi – OBL’s [Osama bin Laden] Libyan lieutenant who had moved into Al Qaeda’s #2 spot after Ayman Zahawiri after the Navy SEALs whacked OBL.

On Tuesday 9/11, a tape was released of Zawahiri announcing that Libi had been killed earlier this year by a US drone attack. The Zawahiri tape was made during Ramadan which ended in the middle of last month. Zawahiri called for his terrorist underlings to avenge Libi’s death and especially exhorted Libyans to take revenge.

The attack in Libya was well planned and executed. It wasn’t about a spontaneous protest against some ridiculous internet movie of Muhammad. The assailants came armed to the teeth, with among other things, RPG 7s. They knew that the US Ambassador was in Benghazi rather than Tripoli. They knew how to track his movements, and were able to strike against him after he and his colleagues left the consulate building and tried to flee in a car. As Israel Channel 2′s Arab Affairs Correspondent Ehud Yaari noted this evening, you don’t often see well trained terrorists participating in protests of movies.

Then there is the attack in Cairo. They were led by Mohammad Zawahiri – Ayman Zawahiri’s brother. According to Thomas Josclyn in the Weekly Standard, the US media has been idiotically presenting him as some sort of moderate despite the fact that in an interview with Al Jazeerah he said said, “We in al Qaeda…”

Egypt’s US supported Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi recently released Zawahiri from Egyptian prison. The same Barack Obama who has no time in his schedule to meet with Prime Minister Netanyahu next week in New York, is scheduled to meet Morsi.

The Egyptian government has not condemned the attack on the US Embassy in Cairo. But Morsi is demanding that the US government prosecute the film’s creator.

You may be wondering how some movie no one’s heard of has caused such a hullabaloo. Well, as it turns out, the film was screened on an Egyptian Salafist television channel. Obviously the Salafists — many of whom, like Zawahiri, were released from prison by Morsi, wanted to stir up anti-US violence on the eve of 9/11. So if the film is responsible for the violence, a finger needs to be pointed to its chief distributor — Al Qaida’s Egyptian friends and members.

With these facts in hand, it is clear that the attempts to present these acts of war against the US as the consequence of some stupid nothing movie are obscene attempts to deflect the blame for these unwarranted attacks onto their victims and away from their perpetrators. (Top)

THE GUILTY MEN BEHIND THE ARAB WINTER

Melanie Phillips

Melanie's blog, September 13, 2012

So now we can see the terrible results of western liberal hubris, the so-called Arab Spring so credulously and stupidly brought into being by Barack Obama, David Cameron and Nicolas Sarkozy. In Libya, the American ambassador and three colleagues have been murdered. In Egypt, the embassy has been sacked. In Yemen, the mob inflamed by Muslim Brotherhood incitement has today stormed the US embassy  there. 

How Obama et al preened and postured over their role in helping the Libyan 'opposition' get rid of Gaddafy! How they congratulated themselves at the fall of Mubarak in Egypt! It was the dawn of democracy, they gushed, a new era for Libyans and Egyptians who were all on Twitter and Facebook and so were clearly modern folk keen to enjoy human rights and the rule of law, and who could now have all of that thanks to the enlightened help of Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy.

In fact, the most likely result always was the empowerment of Islamic radicals who would enslave the people and make war against the west. Obstinately, these arrogant western fools nevertheless stuck to their fantasy of a democratic 'spring', even while the evidence mounted up that what they had actually done was create a vacuum which would unleash the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic radicals and thus set Libya and Egypt on a path back towards the 7th century. 

In Egypt, they helped depose a ruler who was in the pocket of the west; the man they helped install instead, Mohamed Morsi, is not only a Muslim Brotherhood placeman but has been cozying up to Iran. An alliance between the Sunni mortal enemies of the west and the Shia mortal enemies of the west – that's quite an achievement. Well done, Obama, Cameron and Sarkozy!

Now the American ambassador to Libya and three of his colleagues, along with up to ten Libyans, have been most foully murdered by the very mob that we were told represented the new Libya. They burned the American flag [in Egypt] and ran up instead the black flag of jihad. 

The ostensible reason for the violence, an apparently amateurish and deliberately inflammatory film that insulted Islam, was just a pretext (the identity of the film's maker remains a mystery, with the theory growing that it was a Coptic Christian rather than, as originally reported by the BBC, an Israeli film-maker). It now turns out that this was probably a long-planned Islamist attack, possibly by al Qaeda in revenge for the killing of its second-in-command Abu Yahya al-Libi, who was killed in a US drone strike in Pakistan in June.

The Arab Winter has not brought forth democracy but unleashed anarchy and religious fanaticism, with Islamic mobs hitherto kept under control by Gaddafy and Mubarak now empowered, strengthened and rampaging out of control throughout the region.

We know who are the real guilty men here. Even now, Obama is stroking the enemies of the west while kicking its allies in the crotch. 'Too busy' to see Israel's Prime Minister Netanyahu when he comes to Washington later this month to beg for American help in preventing Iran from obtaining the nuclear weapons which it will use to achieve its declared aim of wiping Israel from the face of the earth, Obama will nevertheless meet Morsi, who has so far refused to condemn the storming of the US embassy in Cairo, demanding instead that the US government take action against the maker of the anti-Islamic film — and who last spring released from an Egyptian prison Mohammed Zawahiri, brother of al Qaeda's current leader and who led the mob who stormed the Cairo embassy this week. As James Lewis observes in a fine piece at  American Thinker: 'The United States now stands with the forces of destruction.' (Top)

LIBYA: NOT JUST A TRAGEDY BUT THE
START OF ANOTHER ENDLESS WAR FOR AMERICA
Barry Rubin

PJ Media, September 13, 2012

[Note: Even if you aren't interested in Libya, don't miss the amazing quote at the end.]

Yahoo highlighted two amazing stories shortly after the murder of five American diplomats in Libya and the attack on the U.S. embassy in Egypt that tell us a lot about the intersection between American reality and Middle East reality.

The first article insisted that American officials thought the terror attack on the U.S. embassy was planned (yeah, I don’t think the terrorists were passing by and just happened to have a rocket with them). The other asked tentatively whether maybe the “Arab Spring” hadn’t worked out so well. It’s almost the end of 2012 and these people are still in kindergarten!

Libya tells the story with a terrible irony but we should understand precisely what is going on and how the situation in Libya differs from that in Egypt. For it is proof of the bankruptcy of Obama policy but perhaps in a different way from what many people think. So far the U.S. ambassador, four diplomats, and two U.S. soldiers trying to rescue the rest of the staff have been killed. According to a Libyan officer whose unit was helping the American rescue effort, the terrorists seemed to know precisely where the staffers were hiding. Might they have been tipped off by sources in the Libyan government or military? Probably, yes.

What happened in Libya has nothing to do with an obscure video from California, it has everything to do with the question of which side rules Libya. And the relationship of the attacks to the September 11 anniversary was meant to show that the Libyan terrorists supported September 11 and wanted to continue that battle.

In one sentence: the problem in Libya is that Obama got what he wanted and thus set off all the usual Western policy dilemmas—that he always denounced—which had existed in the region for a century. But Obama is not only ill-equipped to deal with these problems, he either cannot even recognize them or interprets them in ways disastrous for U.S. interests.  For whatever reason you would like to attribute, he wants to make nice with people who want to destroy his country. That might have been a forgivable naivete in early 2009 but by this point it is clear that Obama will never change, and that four more years in office will not improve him and his administration by one millimeter….

And now the problem begins. For the great “anti-imperialist” Obama has set up a classical “imperialist” situation. In Iran, for example, the Eisenhower Administration helped an existing, legitimate regime stay in power in 1953 and this supposedly led to Iranian radicalism and seizure of the U.S. embassy a quarter-century later. In Libya, the process may just take a few months.

The Islamists of various factions, ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to al-Qaida supporters, loathe the new government and the fact that the United States is behind it. In other words, Obama has just done what he has been denouncing his whole life: interfered in another country and…Obama has fallen into precisely the trap he has denounced in all his books and speeches. True, America is not claiming Libya as its territory but Obama’s friends call this “neo-colonialism” and “post-colonialism.” He is now the patron of the Libyan government. If it is incompetent, corrupt, or oppresses the people, Obama shares responsibility….

What are the Libyan government’s options? It can try to appease the opposition by more Islam. But that won’t work really. It can try to appease the opposition by distancing itself from the United States, but given its weakness that won’t work. And it can try to repress the rebels but since it cannot depend on its own military forces–which are riddled with jihadists–that won’t work either.

That is the real lesson in Libya. For once, Obama took sides against the revolutionary Islamists. We are seeing in Egypt and the Gaza Strip that appeasement doesn’t work; we are seeing in Libya that engaging in conflict has its high costs, too.  Obama claims to have “liberated” Libya but to many Libyans he has enslaved it to infidels.

So what next? American military aid to the Libyan government and U.S. military advisors? An endless war against the jihadists? And what if the government in Libya, which is pretty fragile and cannot fully depend on its own military, starts to fall? In Somalia, the local al-Qaida branch didn’t win only because Ethiopia and other African nations sent in thousands of troops. In Bahrain—a complicated situation in which there is a mistreated Shia population whose opposition has both moderates and radicals—the government was only saved by Saudi troops and against the will of the White House.

Treating what has happened in Libya as an isolated tragedy misses the point. Viewing it as generalized proof of Obama’s terrible policy doesn’t get us to the solution. There is a battle going on in the Middle East that will continue for decades. Obama has largely helped the enemy side. In Libya while he gave some help to the Islamists, his basic policy supported the moderates for once. Now the price must be paid or one more country will fall to revolutionary Islamist rule and U.S. influence and credibility decline even further.  This is a war, not a misunderstanding….(Top)

STORMING EMBASSIES, KILLING
AMBASSADORS, AND ‘SMART’ DIPLOMACY
Victor Davis Hanson
National Review, September 12, 2012

The attacks on the U.S. embassy yesterday in Cairo and the storming of the American consulate in Libya, where the U.S. ambassador was murdered along with three staff members — and the initial official American reaction to the mayhem — are all reprehensible, each in their own way. Let us sort out this terrible chain of events.

Timing: The assaults came exactly on the eleventh anniversary of bin Laden’s and al-Qaeda’s attack on America. If there was any doubt about the intent of the timing, the appearance of black al-Qaedist flags among the mobs removed it. The chanting of Osama bin Laden’s name made it doubly clear who were the heroes of the Egyptian mob. Why should we be surprised by the lackluster response of the Egyptian and Libyan “authorities” to protect diplomatic sanctuaries, given the nature of the “governments” in both countries?

One of the Egyptian demonstration’s organizers was Mohamed al-Zawahiri, the brother of the top deputy to Osama bin Laden, and a planner of the 9/11 attacks, which were led by Mohamed Atta, an Egyptian citizen. In Libya, the sick violence is reminding the world that the problem in the Middle East is not dictators propped up by the U.S. — Qaddafi was an archenemy of the U.S. — but the proverbial Arab Street that can blame everything and everyone, from a cartoon to a video, for the wages of its own self-induced pathologies. So far, all the Arab Spring is accomplishing is removing the dictatorial props and authoritarian excuses for grass roots Middle East madness.

Ingratitude: Egypt is currently a beneficiary of more than $1 billion in annual American aid, and its new Muslim Brotherhood–led government is negotiating to have much of its sizable U.S. debt forgiven. Libya, remember, was the recipient of the Obama administration’s “lead from behind” intervention that led to the removal of Moammar Qaddafi — and apparently gave the present demonstrators the freedom to kill Americans. This is all called “smart” diplomacy.

Appeasement: Here are a few sentences from the statement issued by the Cairo embassy before it was attacked: “The Embassy of the United States in Cairo condemns the continuing efforts by misguided individuals to hurt the religious feelings of Muslims — as we condemn efforts to offend believers of all religions. . . .We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.”

The Problem? The embassy was condemning not those zealots who then stormed their own grounds, but some eccentric private citizens back home who made a movie.  One would have thought that the Obama administration had learned something from the Rushdie  fatwa and prophet cartoon incidents. This initial official American diplomatic reaction — to condemn the supposed excess of free speech in the United States, as if the government is responsible for the constitutionally-protected expression of a few private American citizens, while the Egyptian government is not responsible for a mass demonstration and violence against an embassy of the United States — is not just shameful, but absurd.

The author of this American diplomatic statement should be fired immediately — as well as any diplomatic personnel who approved it. Obviously our official representatives overseas do not understand, or have not read, the U.S. Constitution. And if the administration claims the embassy that issued the appeasing statement did so without authority, then we have a larger problem with freelancing diplomats who across the globe weigh in with statements that supposedly do not reflect official policy. Note, however, that the initial diplomatic communiqué is the logical extension of this administration’s rhetoric (see below).

Shame: As gratitude for our overthrowing a cruel despot in Libya, Libyan extremists have murdered the American ambassador and his staffers. The Libyan government, such as it is there, either cannot or will not protect U.S. diplomatic personnel. And the world wonders why last year the U.S. bombed one group of Libyan cutthroats only to aid another.

The attacks in Egypt come a little over three years after the embarrassing Obama Cairo speech, in which the president created an entire mythology about the history of Islam, in vain hopes of appeasing his Egyptian hosts. The violence also follows ongoing comical efforts of the administration to assure us that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt is not an extremist Islamic organization bent on turning Egypt into a theocratic state. And the attacks are simultaneous with President Obama’s ongoing and crude efforts to embarrass Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu.

The future. Expect more violence. The Libyan murderers are now empowered, and, like the infamous Iranian hostage-takers, feel their government either supports them or can’t stop them. The crowd in Egypt knew what it was doing when it chanted Obama’s name juxtaposed to Osama’s.  Obama’s effort to appease Islam is an utter failure, as we see in various polls that show no change in anti-American attitudes in the Middle East …At some point, someone in the administration is going to fathom that the more one seeks to appease radical Islam, the more the latter despises the appeaser….(Top)

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Huffington Post, September 12, 2012
Stephen Braun And Gillian Flaccus

American Spectator, September 13, 2012
Ben Stein

Media Research Center, September 12,2012
Brent Baker

New York Times, September 13, 2012
Nasser Arrabyee And Alan Cowell

Front Page Magazine, August 2012
Frank Gaffney