The Night The Ambassador Was Killed...by Jamil Shawwa

The killing of the US ambassador to Libya yesterday night, the day America Commemorates the 09/11/2001 tragic terrorist attacks, should not pass with the regular and routine condemnation;its much bigger and grander than that. Not Enough that President Obama issued a strong obituary for the ambassador's death AND condemned the attack and asked to increase security for the embassies around the world; the crime is beyond it. It is about the questionable lack of anticipation and preparations to what looks like now to many as something that was expected. But even if it were not expected-for the sake of argument- but it should have been, due to the magnitude changes in that part of the world, where the newly elected governments of Egypt and Libya, continue to try to make “democratic statements” by allowing groups and individuals to break every law, to attack every place they do not like and jump over the walls and fences of embassies burning properties and disgracing flags and as in Benghazi killing the ambassador in premeditated action. Then  the event gets stronger consequences and have loads of more questions about how the US is perceived to encourage lawlessness in the Middle East in the name of democracy. But things even get worse, instead of just addressing the murder of the ambassador, president Obama said that the relations with Libya will not be threatened by this murder; how come, and how wrong. The issue this morning was not the relations with Libya but what is the US doing to protect its  diplomats and ambassadors in areas that are not stable and where security is obviously and well known not to be found, not enough, or lack of it is on purpose allowed. The demonstrations started earlier in Cairo Egypt, where the Egyptian government allowed demonstrators to climb the embassy walls, and burn the US flags and replacing it with flags of hate, that they called falsely flags of Islam. So the US had ample time between then, giving the administration the ultimate benefit of the doubt, to prepare for what was to be in Libya; the symptoms were  the same and the movements were the same- even as we speak more information came in that the administration was expecting an attack or said to expect that mobs, criminals, would take advantage of  protests for Egyptian American producers showing an insulting movie about the Prophet Muhammad, to attack the consulate in Benghazi. In Egypt the reaction from the Obama administration was complacent, almost nothing, no reaction for attacking the embassy- the embassy issued a statement condemning hurting the emotions of the Muslims by individuals showing a movie claiming it represents Prophet's Muhammad life, which is good but in the same time the embassy should at least have urged the Egyptian government to act and protect its walls and flags. The libyans took it further, no reaction in Cairo, then go for it in Benghazi, they fired rockets and grenades and suffocated the ambassador whom reports said went with three other individuals to Benghazi to save the consulate- went alone, no security details, no libyan escorts, nothing. I do not believe this could have been worse, three or four individuals going to a chaotic, lawless area, trying to save something that should have been in the first place saved by the marines inside the consulate and the Libyan security forces outside. Well, forget about the Libyans for now, but the Marines. America by being hypocritical to the negative side and lawlessness of the  Arabs rising in Egypt and Libya and elsewhere, is not providing service to anyone, not to itself, nor to the fledgling democracies there. Embassies should be protected and can be protected and we have the know how and the intelligence resources to protect even in chaotic places; for God’s sake, the Middle East is as a whole a well monitored American piece of real estate. Things happen, for sure, but what happened yesterday is an act of weakness or complacency on the part of the US or both and this needs to be corrected. Complacency to chaos and terror, historically, for long run,  never paid off.