John Hinderaker
PowerLine
1/21/2013
The Washington Post reports today that al Qaeda’s successful attack on the Algerian natural gas plant has greatly boosted al Qaeda’s prestige in Africa. Along the way, the Post notes rather casually:
The assailants were well-trained and armed with what appear to have been weapons from the late Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi’s arsenal.
The overthrow of Moammar Gaddafi has turned out to be a terrible blunder. It has empowered radical Muslims, led directly to the Benghazi debacle, and scattered Gaddafi’s armory among terrorist elements, including al Qaeda. There has been, of course, no accountability for the Libya decision, either with respect to the Obama administration or others outside the administration who supported Obama’s policy.
All of which reminded me of Andy McCarthy’s column in National Review. McCarthy criticizes John McCain for his support of Obama’s failed Libya policy, and contrasts McCain with another Republican who gets less respect as a foreign policy expert:
[T]he senator and his allies in the Obama-Clinton State Department had a brilliant notion: The reason the “rebels” of eastern Libya hated America so much had nothing to do with their totalitarian, incorrigibly anti-Western ideology. No, no: The problem was that we sided with Qaddafi, giving the dictator — at the insistence of, well, McCain and the State Department — foreign aid, military assistance, and international legitimacy. If we just threw Qaddafi under the bus, the rebels would surely become our grand democratic allies.
This, of course, was a much more sophisticated theory than you’d get from lunatics like Michele Bachmann. Sit down for this, because I know it’s hard to believe anyone could spout such nutter stuff, but Bachmann actually opposed U.S. intervention in Libya. She claimed — stop cackling! — that many of McCain’s heroes might actually be jihadists ideologically hostile to the U.S. and linked to groups such as al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), the terror enterprise’s North African franchise. She even thought — yeah, I know, crazy — that if Qaddafi were deposed, the heroes would get their hands on his arsenal, ship a lot of it to AQIM havens in places such as Mali and Algeria, and maybe even turn rebel strongholds such as Benghazi into death traps for Americans.
Good thing we listened to McCain, no?…
…Andy notes something of which I was unaware–an effort to kick Michele Bachmann off the Intelligence Committee because she had the temerity to suggest that it was a bad idea for the Secretary of State to employ a staffer with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood…
The complete article is at PowerLine.
H/T Joe Miller
Related: Boom: CBS’ Sharyl Attkisson tears into Obama Admin over Benghazigate
Read it!
Update: “Just hours before he died in a terrorist attack at the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Ambassador Chris Stevens sent a cable to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton… painting a chaotic, violent portrait of the eastern Libya city and warning that local militias were threatening to pull the security they afforded U.S. officials.”
