Pop U.S. history quiz: on what date did the U.S. officially enter World War II?
Though Japan’s sneak attack at Pearl Harbor happened on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1941, President Roosevelt did not ask Congress to declare war on Japan until the next day, Dec. 8. We didn’t officially declare war on Germany and Italy until Dec. 11, and that was only after they declared war on us.
Now, hold that thought.
Like most Americans, I woke up this morning to the news that our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, had been attacked and four Americans, including our ambassador to Libya, had been killed. All kinds of thoughts ran through my head… Are we going to be dragged into another war? was the overarching one. Because, when someone attacks American soil (which an embassy is, legally), something like war usually happens. Maybe not World War II, exactly, but still – ships get moved, bombs get dropped. People die.
It’s not something anyone in leadership takes (or should take) lightly. Even after Pearl Harbor, it took another day for our country to say, yes, we’re going to war. Facts have to come in and be processed.
And, after Libya, the facts are still coming in. I read news reports first thing in the morning, at lunch and again before leaving work at the end of the day. From that time, the story moved from: attack in Libya – by whom? Its new post-Qadaffi government? No, by rebels, and the Libyan government is condemning them. Was the date (Sept. 11) deliberate? Wait, there was a less violent, but still frightening protest at the embassy in Cairo, which appears to have been motivated by some movie that no one has seen that insults the prophet Muhammed. By late afternoon, reports were that the Libya attack may’ve been planned after all.
All I could think this morning was: please, God, don’t let the election dictate our country’s response in any way. American lives – and the lives of the Libyans who’d be caught in the cross-fire – are too important to turn this grave incident into a political opportunity. What should happen is the State Department telling our supposed Libyan allies, “Either you find the people responsible for this, or we will,” and that actually happening because the Libyan government doesn’t want a giant piece of glass on the north side of Africa where Libya used to be. THAT is Teddy Roosevelt’s big stick, despite what our resident idiots-with-Facebook think – the threat of what our military is capable of should we not get what we want using diplomacy.
How naïve of me, to have worried about the president. Because it turns out that the guy who thinks he can be president was the one who’d screw this up.
At 10:09 last night, Mitt Romney started. Oh, he embargoed his statement bashing President Obama until midnight, so he wouldn’t technically be violating the unsaid prohibition against politicking on the anniversary of the worst attack on our country in history (which kind of pisses me off even more, actually. Own it, you weasel.) Anyway, Romney’s statement said:
"I'm outraged by the attacks on American diplomatic missions in Libya and Egypt and by the death of an American consulate worker in Benghazi. It's disgraceful that the Obama Administration's first response was not to condemn attacks on our diplomatic missions, but to sympathize with those who waged the attacks."
Note: this (the tweets) came BEFORE the fatal attack in Libya, so I guess at that point Romney was responding to a riot at the Cairo embassy, which at one point breached the embassy wall. It sounds awful, and had to have been terrifying for the Americans inside, especially considering what day it was. It was the embassy staff that tweeted the messages Romney apparently objected to, not the White House or the State Department (again, BEFORE the Libya attack.) The relevant tweets are listed on this timeline link. None of them were ok’d by the Obama Administration. And Romney's statement does nothing to point out that the tweets he's responding to were about an impending riot, NOT a murder of a U.S. diplomat.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a statement at 10:38 p.m., and the president’s full official statement came about 7 this morning, confirming Ambassador Chris Stevens’ death. Romney continued to criticize the administration this morning, not admitting that the entire premise of his original statement was wrong, or even saying that the situation was more serious now that U.S. diplomats had been murdered. Instead, Romney continued to conflate tweets from a random embassy staffer with official U.S. foreign policy.
Right now – a full 24 hours after Cairo, after Benghazi – there are Americans in embassies and consulates all over North Africa and the Middle East. There are college students and mission workers volunteering their time. There are employees of multi-national corporations just doing their jobs. And right now, if there really is a coordinated terrorist movement to take out Westerners, every single one of them is a target. It’s the State Department’s, and President Obama’s, job to get them all out of harm’s way before any more sh*t hits the fan.
And a guy who has a 50-50 shot of being our next “decider” going on national TV to basically say “Screw waiting – let’s start lobbing some cruise missiles!” or whatever the hell Romney was going on about – that DOES NOT HELP. A president gets this. (They have TVs in Libya, Mitt! And they watch them!)
A president is also aware of the fact that, 18 months after the Arab Spring, places like Egypt and Libya are going through what countries always go through when they get free of dictators – a long, painful, sometimes violent negotiation between radical and moderate factions. The U.S. may be a symbol, but ultimately it’s not about us. There are times when the best thing we can do is say “My name’s Paul, and this is between y’all,” and get the hell out of Dodge – we’ll be here with aid and investors when y’all get it figured out.
Even other conservatives are saying that Romney should’ve just kept his mouth shut. It isn’t about discretion on 9/11, or about presenting a unified front when our country’s interests are attacked – although Fox News would be having a stroke now if this were 2008 and Obama’d said half of what Romney did today. Romney all but disqualified himself as a potential commander in chief by rushing to judgment, albeit with just as few specifics about what he thinks we should do as he has on the subject of his domestic policy. “No apologies” is not a foreign policy. Does Mitt Romney know that?
It took Franklin Roosevelt days to enter World War II. It took George W. Bush weeks to send troops to Afghanistan after 9/11. It took George Bush months after Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait to launch the Gulf War. It took Mitt Romney mere minutes to declare that President Obama wasn’t doing enough, while not bothering to say what he’d do differently. And who would be affected.
No comments:
Post a Comment