Libya has become a campaign issue in the US presidential election race. The Romney team has taken the murder of US Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens and three other Americans on September 11, and is doing everything it can to paint the Obama regime as incompetent, shifty and blind. Hillary Clinton's declaration yesterday that she alone was responsible, as Secretary of State, is unlikely to change anything. On the face of it, the Obama administration has not covered itself in glory. The first slaying of a US ambassador since 1979 came after a key part of the diplomat's security detail was withdrawn on orders from the State Department, which is being forced to slash costs under pressure from Romney's Republican party. The very day of his death, Stevens had cabled his bosses that higher security for the US diplomatic mission in Libya was essential. There is however an oddity to the Stevens assassination that has been little remarked. The ambassador was a fluent Arabic speaker, well-respected in the country and particularly in Benghazi, where he had first arrived during the revolution to represent the United States to the rebels. It is arguable that of all the foreign diplomats there, he knew best the tortuous rivalries in Libya's second city and was well aware of the fanaticism of Ansar Al-Shariah, the group that almost certainly killed him. Why therefore did Stevens choose to go to Benghazi, not only on the anniversary of 9/11 but at a time when public opinion throughout the Muslim world was outraged at the blasphemous film thrown together by an Islamophobe of Egyptian Coptic origin? Just as importantly, why was Stevens not aware that the security at the temporary Benghazi consulate was at best gimcrack and at worst almost non-existent? A $350,000 contract to protect the compound had been given to a British company. However, on the night of the attack, some of the guards had not turned up for work and the rest were woefully underarmed to take on some 200 attackers. If Stevens did not understand the risk of visiting Benghazi at such a sensitive time, then either he was not the Libya expert he seemed, or he made a catastrophic error of judgement, perhaps imagining that he would be protected by his high local reputation. The Obama administration did not help itself by originally asserting that the attack was part of the protest against the film, even when it was clearly a pre-meditated and well-executed onslaught. Though Harry Truman, one of Obama's predecessors in the Oval Office, once pronounced famously of every US president, “the buck stops here”, is it actually fair to be pillorying Obama on the campaign trail for a string of errors of judgement and communications failures before and after the four murders? There are those, including the ambassador's father, Jan Stevens, who feel that it is abhorrent for the Romney campaign to make political capital out of the Benghazi tragedy. Obama's Middle East foreign policy has had faults enough, since he raised hopes so high with his Cairo speech. Romney could be attacking those failures, except that to do so would reveal the Republican candidate's naked partiality for Israel. However, to be trying to land a big electoral blow on the president by standing on the bodies of ambassador Stevens and his three colleagues is not an engaging spectacle. US voters may agree on November 6.
