Just so we know, Benghazi is the second largest city in Libya and has a long history. And all the gangrene being generated in its wounds is political poison used to embarrass President Barack Obama and put Hilary Clinton up against the electoral wall. Yes, mistakes were made, initial cover-ups in particular. But many Republican critics, including family members of the lost, should remember this is the ugly price one pays for playing regime change.
It’s an open invitation to chaos once the government in charge is destabilized to the level Libya was and the body of it’s dead leader, Muammar Gaddafi, put on display in the freezer of a butcher shop of in a shopping center. In fact, Libya’s head was cut off. There is a very excellent post mortem done by Peter Lavelle on his discussion show Crosstalk on RT.com that amplifies this commentary.
The truth is, after the no-fly zone was put in place by NATO forces, albeit without Congress’s approval, and France jumped in on the fun to help bomb and kill 100,000 Libyans, the government fell with a crash and the level of Al Qaeda (thugs) and other terrorist elements elevated, like so many jackals around the carcass of a dying animal and began tearing it apart.
Anecdotally, ex-CIA official Ray McGovern [one of the guests on Crosstalk], described a physically very, large powerful-looking CIA official, saying that the latter had not seen this much destructive firepower amassed in his seventeen years of experience with U.S. Embassy security, nor had McGovern in his time.
There were more than 100 alleged terrorist attackers involved in the attack on the U.S. consulate compound and the nearby CIA annex in another diplomatic compound. The attackers were loaded to the teeth with weapons, including grenade launchers, AK-47s, and large numbers of rocket-launchers.
They literally gutted the compounds. In one official’s words, the U.S. security forces were simply overcome and flattened with the power thrown at them. To have not crumbled to this size attacking force was not an option that hinged on someone’s decision, unless it was to not have been there in the first place.
The larger issue is that in order to avoid this happening again, hither and yon, it implies in a way that all our diplomatic missions everywhere have to be armed and buttressed to the teeth like the Green-zone fortress in Iraq, and with enough fighting forces to cope with a serious numbers of attackers and weaponry. But that’s impossible due to budget and personnel constraints.
But then the shit storm going on back home in Congress, with fingers pointing in all directions, mainly at Obama and Clinton, is an ugly picture, just more jackals feasting on the flesh of the survivors. The cant has become an obscene blues, with its predictable chord changes and licks, second-guess accusations of malfeasance, lying, story-changing and pure partisan politics.
The alternate to all these blues might be to change our tune about regime change, along with a philosophy not to put “democracy in place” in many places where people might not want it, or be ready for it, or even want to go near democracy, especially the kind backed by crooked free-enterprisers, most egregiously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the latter which possess a formidable nuclear arsenal. Not all these countries are pushovers.
In fact, writing this is a kind of position paper because I’m getting a headache from all the right-wing rhetoricians and their angry comments, looking for sympathy from a liberal, whether I like it or not. Mostly not! The message is: If you wanta hold a dance, you have to pay the band.
Moreover, in this empire-building fiasco we’ve been pouring blood and cash in for nigh unto a dozen years now in this fiasco called “The War on Terror,” expect the worst to happen at times as well as some modest successes here and there. Expect all kinds of people to dislike and even hate us for having interfered in their political business, droned or outright killed their citizens, ruined their countries and instigated the murder of their leaders and innocents, who always seem to take the biggest hit.
With the U.S. economy in financial ruin, you’d think we’d want to tend our own garden, as Voltaire recommended, and get life straightened out back home. Our debt is higher than it ever was, our financial markets are totally crooked, inspiring international markets to go rogue as well, creating austerity programs that hurt and kill the little people around the world, and at home running our spendthrift FED easement printing press endlessly to coddle “too big to fail” banks, which in the end could break our people’s back.
So ladies, gentlemen, if you really don’t want another Benghazi, if you’re not going to zip your lips over the foresaid and linked reasons for this disaster, detox Congress from its jag as an overpaid, bribe-drunk, in-the-bag-to-special-interest groups, not working for the people of the United States. Change begins at home with building our assets back up and not wasting our resources and energy on verbal infighting, spewing out 1% truth, 99% lies.
That behavior never won a war or an attack on a diplomatic mission. As the cliché goes, “United we stand, divided we fall.” We certainly fell with a dull thud in Benghazi, and the reason was we were under-manned and under-equipped to be there. Now we’ve got too many too many chiefs and are running out of Indians to cover their wars. Being the world’s Empire comes with a supremely high cost of blood and guts, not just cash and debt.
Once we learn that, really learn it, maybe we can stop singing those whining Benghazi blues, and start speaking like responsible grownups again, especially as Memorial Day approaches, asking for its homage to the lost fighting men and women of our present and past wars, practically nonstop in my 74 years.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com.He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
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Oh, those Benghazi blues
Posted on May 22, 2013 by Jerry Mazza
Just so we know, Benghazi is the second largest city in Libya and has a long history. And all the gangrene being generated in its wounds is political poison used to embarrass President Barack Obama and put Hilary Clinton up against the electoral wall. Yes, mistakes were made, initial cover-ups in particular. But many Republican critics, including family members of the lost, should remember this is the ugly price one pays for playing regime change.
It’s an open invitation to chaos once the government in charge is destabilized to the level Libya was and the body of it’s dead leader, Muammar Gaddafi, put on display in the freezer of a butcher shop of in a shopping center. In fact, Libya’s head was cut off. There is a very excellent post mortem done by Peter Lavelle on his discussion show Crosstalk on RT.com that amplifies this commentary.
The truth is, after the no-fly zone was put in place by NATO forces, albeit without Congress’s approval, and France jumped in on the fun to help bomb and kill 100,000 Libyans, the government fell with a crash and the level of Al Qaeda (thugs) and other terrorist elements elevated, like so many jackals around the carcass of a dying animal and began tearing it apart.
Anecdotally, ex-CIA official Ray McGovern [one of the guests on Crosstalk], described a physically very, large powerful-looking CIA official, saying that the latter had not seen this much destructive firepower amassed in his seventeen years of experience with U.S. Embassy security, nor had McGovern in his time.
There were more than 100 alleged terrorist attackers involved in the attack on the U.S. consulate compound and the nearby CIA annex in another diplomatic compound. The attackers were loaded to the teeth with weapons, including grenade launchers, AK-47s, and large numbers of rocket-launchers.
They literally gutted the compounds. In one official’s words, the U.S. security forces were simply overcome and flattened with the power thrown at them. To have not crumbled to this size attacking force was not an option that hinged on someone’s decision, unless it was to not have been there in the first place.
The larger issue is that in order to avoid this happening again, hither and yon, it implies in a way that all our diplomatic missions everywhere have to be armed and buttressed to the teeth like the Green-zone fortress in Iraq, and with enough fighting forces to cope with a serious numbers of attackers and weaponry. But that’s impossible due to budget and personnel constraints.
But then the shit storm going on back home in Congress, with fingers pointing in all directions, mainly at Obama and Clinton, is an ugly picture, just more jackals feasting on the flesh of the survivors. The cant has become an obscene blues, with its predictable chord changes and licks, second-guess accusations of malfeasance, lying, story-changing and pure partisan politics.
The alternate to all these blues might be to change our tune about regime change, along with a philosophy not to put “democracy in place” in many places where people might not want it, or be ready for it, or even want to go near democracy, especially the kind backed by crooked free-enterprisers, most egregiously in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the latter which possess a formidable nuclear arsenal. Not all these countries are pushovers.
In fact, writing this is a kind of position paper because I’m getting a headache from all the right-wing rhetoricians and their angry comments, looking for sympathy from a liberal, whether I like it or not. Mostly not! The message is: If you wanta hold a dance, you have to pay the band.
Moreover, in this empire-building fiasco we’ve been pouring blood and cash in for nigh unto a dozen years now in this fiasco called “The War on Terror,” expect the worst to happen at times as well as some modest successes here and there. Expect all kinds of people to dislike and even hate us for having interfered in their political business, droned or outright killed their citizens, ruined their countries and instigated the murder of their leaders and innocents, who always seem to take the biggest hit.
With the U.S. economy in financial ruin, you’d think we’d want to tend our own garden, as Voltaire recommended, and get life straightened out back home. Our debt is higher than it ever was, our financial markets are totally crooked, inspiring international markets to go rogue as well, creating austerity programs that hurt and kill the little people around the world, and at home running our spendthrift FED easement printing press endlessly to coddle “too big to fail” banks, which in the end could break our people’s back.
So ladies, gentlemen, if you really don’t want another Benghazi, if you’re not going to zip your lips over the foresaid and linked reasons for this disaster, detox Congress from its jag as an overpaid, bribe-drunk, in-the-bag-to-special-interest groups, not working for the people of the United States. Change begins at home with building our assets back up and not wasting our resources and energy on verbal infighting, spewing out 1% truth, 99% lies.
That behavior never won a war or an attack on a diplomatic mission. As the cliché goes, “United we stand, divided we fall.” We certainly fell with a dull thud in Benghazi, and the reason was we were under-manned and under-equipped to be there. Now we’ve got too many too many chiefs and are running out of Indians to cover their wars. Being the world’s Empire comes with a supremely high cost of blood and guts, not just cash and debt.
Once we learn that, really learn it, maybe we can stop singing those whining Benghazi blues, and start speaking like responsible grownups again, especially as Memorial Day approaches, asking for its homage to the lost fighting men and women of our present and past wars, practically nonstop in my 74 years.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.