Thursday, June 19, 2014

Two updates on Benghazi

In my last post I outlined what I think is going on with the Benghazi scandal. Briefly, I think Hillary Clinton directed her assets in the State Department, which is in charge of foreign embassies, to secretly smuggle weapons to Libyan jihadist groups on the understanding they would be used against the Iranian-backed Assad regime in Syria. When these jihadist groups started moving these weapons elsewhere, the State Department began trying to track them down with the help of the CIA, and the jihadist groups retaliated by attacking the U.S. embassy and CIA annex in Benghazi.

The first update is the Boko Haram situation in Nigeria. Seemingly unrelated to Benghazi, some news outlets reported that Boko Haram had come into possession of weapons they got from Libya. This is not surprising considering the historic overland trade routes between north and west Africa. Boko Haram got into the news a couple of weeks ago because they had become much more aggressive recently and kidnapped over 200 girls, vowing to sell them into slavery. "Boko Haram" means basically "non-Islamic education is sin". The girls were getting such an education when they were abducted. Now, this sort of thing happens all the time in the Muslim world. I question why this particular incident made it into the news. I suppose Boko Haram has been more active lately, possibly due to their acquisition of weapons from Libya, but the rather overblown calls for U.S. intervention trumped up by the media seem fake to me. Again, this sort of thing happens all the time. The U.S. normally only gets involved when it feels as if it has some responsibility for what's happening. Perhaps that is the case in Nigeria because Clinton's State Department supplied the weapons that Boko Haram is now using to escalate their activities. There were all sorts of calls in the media for U.S. to send in troops to rescue these girls, but that is just a political cover for what really ended up happening. The U.S. did not send in special forces to extract the kidnapped schoolgirls. However, Obama did send in an eighty-man drone team for "intelligence purposes". Drones which could potentially scout and identify caches of smuggled U.S. weapons in the hands of Boko Haram. Drones which could fire missiles at those weapons caches and destroy them. Drones which could destroy evidence that Hillary Clinton smuggled weapons to Islamic terrorists who used them to attack schoolgirls. Drones which certainly could not effect a rescue of said schoolgirls.

I should remind the reader that last part is conjecture.

The second update is the escalating situation in Iraq concerning a Sunni jihadist group now known as Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) sometimes referred to as Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant. ISIS is an alliance of Sunni jihadist rebel groups in Syria that has now taken over large portions of territory in Iraq, including several Sunni areas that were the scene of fierce fighting during the Iraq war. It is now being reported that ISIS is in possession of U.S. weaponry. It is also being reported that certain factions in D.C., including Senators McCain and Graham, want intervention in Iraq against ISIS, after advocating intervention in Syria for ISIS. In a little reported episode a few weeks ago, McCain all but endorsed Hillary Clinton at an event in Arizona. I believe Senators Graham and McCain both knew about Clinton's gunrunning, supported it, and are now trying to help her mitigate the consequences by advocating U.S. involvement against Boko Haram and ISIS. Once again, U.S. involvement precipitates more schizophrenic U.S. involvement seemingly acting against itself when U.S. involvement doesn't achieve its desired ends due to massive incompetence in our foreign policy establishment in its basic understanding of the peoples of this world.

Now that's whack.