Along those lines, the New York Times reported today that the killing of Stevens and the evacuation of all Americans from Benghazi both exposed and disrupted a far larger CIA contingent (“operatives and contractors”) in the city than was previously known - even by Libya’s supposedly sovereign government. That the US exploited its “humanitarian intervention” to establish a substantial covert CIA beachhead is the opposite of surprising. Those operatives, among other things, worked on “tracking shoulder-fired missiles taken from the former arsenals of” Gadaffis’ forces and “aided in efforts to secure Libya’s chemical weapons stockpiles”.
Yet again, western military intervention spawns vast instability and leads to the proliferation of weapons into the hands of extremists deeply hostile to the US. As Jonathan Schwarz, referring to the US support of the pre-Al-Qaeda mujahdeen in Afghanistan, sardonically noted in the aftermath of the 11 September Benghazi attack: “with practice and better technology, we’ve really cut down the turnaround time between arming Islamists and them killing Americans on 9/11.”
We see this over and over and yet never learn the lesson. The New York Times editorial page today declared the Iraqi government “on the wrong side” by virtue of its alignment with Iran and Syria and suggested that US aid - only a fraction of what is necessary to rebuild that country after the US destroyed it - should be cut off if such insolence continues. US-enabled regime change, time and again, exacerbates the very problems it is ostensibly intended to resolve.
If the Iraqi government continues to side with Iran, how much longer will it be before calls for regime change in Iraq are renewed? And how much longer will it be before we hear that military intervention in Libya is (again) necessary, this time to control the anti-US extremists who are now armed and empowered by virtue of the first intervention? US military interventions are most adept at ensuring that future US military interventions will always be necessary.
It is no wonder, then, that the State Department is so infuriated that CNN reported the serious concerns expressed by Ambassador Stevens. Those journal entries further impugn the US government’s now discredited story about the Benghazi attack, and further underscore the profound instability and danger in Libya in the wake of that intervention. Feigned concerns over the sensitivities of the Stevens family notwithstanding, that is exactly why the Obama administration and its loyalists are so incensed by CNN’s reporting, and it is exactly why CNN had not only the right, but also the duty, to report this.
(via jayaprada)
