Opinion

The real Benghazi price

The political ramifications of Wednesday’s hearing on the Benghazi fiasco are actually secondary to two far more serious issues: the continuing politicization of the Intelligence Community and the shocking state of our military.

First, the IC — especially the CIA and its nominal overlord, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.

Clapper, you’ll recall, popped up back in November to take the fall for having edited all references to al Qaeda and terrorism out of the unclassified talking points on the Benghazi attack. But we now know that the blame falls on the State Department, whose demands the White House ordered the CIA to meet.

Those talking points, eagerly peddled by UN Ambassador Susan Rice and also by then-Secretary of State Clinton and President Obama himself — at the United Nations, no less — falsely blamed the murderous assaults on Muslim anger over an obscure YouTube video that insulted Mohammed.

Yet Gregory Hicks — a career diplomat who was the late Ambassador Chris Stevens’ deputy at the time of the attacks — testified that everybody in the loop knew the attacks were jihadi terrorism almost immediately.

So why did Clapper lie so publicly and so blatantly about the decision to read al Qaeda out of the official record? Why cover for the White House and Foggy Bottom? Politics is the only possible answer.

Alas, political manipulation of the IC has become the rule under this administration. In the Obama years, our lead intelligence organization, the CIA, has been run by a party hack (Leon Panetta), a highly political and ethically compromised war hero (David Petraeus) and a Beltway apparatchik (John Brennan) whose job has been to either tell the politicians what they want to hear or simply shut up.

This is no way to run the kind of professional, independent intelligence service on which our national security depends. Political judgments must take professionally gathered and analyzed intelligence into dispassionate account; the intelligence shouldn’t be smelted into a politically palatable form for campaign use.

Yet the state of the US military, as revealed in the hearing, may be even more dispiriting.

Assume that the administration is telling the truth when it says there were no US assets in the region that could be mobilized in time to make a difference in the ferocious Libyan firefight — in which a handful of Americans held off dozens or even hundreds of jihadis for 10 hours. What does that tell us?

Once, the Sixth Fleet made the Mediterranean an American lake — and yet it was unable to scramble a single fighter jet to at least buzz the compounds in the North African coastal city of Benghazi. Force reductions throughout the Navy have left the service with a mere 288 ships to patrol the seas, about half what it had under President Ronald Reagan.

What’s more, we now know that special forces in Tripoli ordered into action at the height of the firefight were told — by diplomats, not generals — to stand down.

This civilian humiliation of the special ops — who today constitute not only the tip of the military spear, but much of the spear itself — has left career military personnel fuming. It’s one thing to fight and lose against overwhelming odds; it’s another not to try to fight at all.

And that’s why Benghazi matters. In the scheme of things, it was a small engagement on the fringes of the civilized world. But that’s how civilizations fall — when they’re too weak or enervated to defend themselves and the principles for which their emissaries stand. Just ask ancient Rome.