The White House is considering launching drone strikes and Special Forces raids in retaliation for the fatal September 11 attacks on the US consulate and a CIA facility in Libyaâs eastern city of Benghazi, the Associated Press reported Monday.
Pressure is building for the Obama administration to take military action before the presidential election in less than three weeks, as the Republicans and their presidential candidate Mitt Romney continue their efforts to turn the Benghazi incident into a central issue in the campaign.
âThe White House, under political pressure to respond forcefully to the Sept. 11 attack on the US Consulate in Benghazi, is readying strike forces and drones but first has to find a target,â according to the AP report, which cited three current administration officials and one former official, as well as an outside analyst consulted by the White House.
The outside analyst, who has extensive experience in Africa, told AP that the administration had contacted him for help in âconnecting the dotsââthe same language used by the Bush administration in fabricating its case for the invasion of Iraqâbetween the Benghazi attack and northern Mali, where
Islamists, including elements linked to Al Qaeda of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), have taken control of territory roughly the size of France.
The Islamists in the area have denied any connection to the attack in Benghazi, which claimed the life of the US ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans. A spokesman for the Islamists told AP: âIf America hits us, I promise you we will multiply the Sept. 11 attack by 10.â
The other movement suspected in connection with the attack, the Libyan Islamist militia Ansar al Shariah, has also denied responsibility. According to AP, citing the unnamed US officials, âUS investigators have only linked âone or two namesâ to the attack and they lack proof that it was planned ahead of time or that local fighters had any help from the larger Al Qaeda affiliate.â
The report adds that Washington is more likely to âsimply target the suspects with US covert actionâ than to ask the Libyan government and Libyan security forces, which exert little control over Benghazi or, indeed, the rest of the country, to arrest and extradite them.
The overriding aim of such action, delivered as an âOctober surpriseâ on the eve of the vote in November, would be to counter the Republicansâ exploitation of the Benghazi attack to cast the Obama administration as insufficiently aggressive in its foreign policy.
Libyan officials have warned that a unilateral US attack on militias in Benghazi has the potential of accelerating the countryâs disintegration.
In a transparent attempt to deflect Republican attacks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared Monday, during a state visit to Peru, that she, not Obama, was responsible for the security arrangements at US facilities in Libya. Former security officials at the embassy in Tripoli testified at a congressional hearing last week that they had sought to keep a larger US armed force there, but officials in Washington rejected their request.
âI take responsibility,â Clinton told CNN, while going on to state that âsecurity professionalsâ made the decisions on embassy security. She also disputed Republican charges that the Obama administration had deliberately misled the public by claiming for two weeks after the Benghazi attack that it had resulted from a âspontaneousâ demonstration against a rabidly anti-Islamic video, rather than a planned terrorist attack. She attributed the shift in the administrationâs position to âthe fog of war.â
She said that her aim was to avoid âsome kind of political gotcha or blame game.â
Republicans, however, were having none of it. Three Republican members of the Senate Armed Services CommitteeâJohn McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshireâissued a statement insisting, âThe security of Americans serving our nation everywhere in the world is ultimately the job of the commander-in-chief. The buck stops there.â
The Republicansâ attack on Obama is opportunistic and cynical. They know that the Democrats cannot effectively answer their accusations. The real issue in Benghazi was not merely inadequate security or a politically driven attempt to misrepresent the attack.
Rather, what unraveled with the assault on the American consulate in Benghazi was what the US had been doing there since Ambassador Stevens was first sent aboard a freighter in April 2011 to serve as Washingtonâs liaison to the so-called ârebels.â
The aim was to use Libyan militiasâarmed, funded and trained by the US and its alliesâto follow up on the ground the intensive air war conducted by the US and NATO for the purpose of toppling Colonel Muammar Gaddafi and installing a more pliant puppet regime in his place. Determined to avoid putting American âboots on the ground,â Stevens and Washington forged an alliance with Gaddafiâs longest standing opponents, elements who came out of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, which was in turn affiliated with Al Qaeda.
As a result of this strategy, which enjoyed bipartisan support, Washington armed, trained and militarily supported militias that were led by figures such as Abdelhakim Belhadj, who headed the Tripoli Military Council, and Sufyan Ben Qumu, who commanded the Darnah Brigade in the war to topple Gaddafi and went on to become a leader of Ansar al Shariah. The former had been subjected to torture and extraordinary rendition by the CIA before being turned over to the Gaddafi regime in 2004, while the latter spent five years in Guantanamo before being sent back to Libya. He has been named by some sources as a suspect in the Benghazi attack.
Washingtonâs aim was to harness these Al Qaeda-linked forces to the US-NATO war effort and shove them aside once Gaddafi was overthrown. However, with no real central government having emerged in Tripoli, and reconstruction of the devastated country yet to begin, the militias, bitter over the US failure to cut them in on the spoils of war, continue to exercise control over much of Libya. Under these conditions, the assassination of Stevens was a matter of Washingtonâs chickens coming home to roost.
Until the September 11 attack on the Benghazi consulate, the ostensible Libyan success was being promoted within the US ruling establishment as a new model for waging war for regime-change, and it was reprised in the form of the sectarian civil war to oust Bashar al-Assad in Syria.
Libyan Islamist fighters and weapons have played a significant role in the Syrian war, and there is every reason to believe that the beefed-up CIA station in Benghaziâalong with another CIA base on the Turkish-Syrian borderâwas involved in working out the logistics of getting them to the new battle front.
Neither the Obama administration nor the Republicans can raise the central issue posed by the attack on the US consulate in Benghaziâthe alliance between the US and Al Qaeda-linked forces in both Libya and Syriaâbecause it explodes the pretense of the âwar on terror,â which has served as the basic ideological framework for the eruption of US militarism in the Middle East and Central Asia since 9/11.
The imperialist operations in Libya and Syria have been facilitated from the outset by a collection of petty-bourgeois pseudo-left organizations, such as the International Socialist Organization, that have provided âleftâ justifications for Western intervention in support of the Libyan and Syrian ârevolutions.â
Now, with the events in Benghazi, this strategy has blown up in Washingtonâs face on the eve of the presidential elections. Whatever partisan hay the Republican challenger attempts to make of it, this disaster will serve as the starting point for a new and more massive US military intervention in the region once the elections are over.