Last week, the House Committee on Oversight held hearings on the “Security Failures at Benghazi” to investigate whether the level of security that the State Department provided at the Benghazi compound was consummate to the possible threat. Embassy security is obviously a huge issue, and it becomes even more so after a deadly attack that kills an ambassador. The fundamentals of that discussion lead to questions of the need to protect the safety of an embassy’s diplomats and employees versus the need project an open and positive image toward the host country. That debate will never be settled. Whether the specific debate about the safety of the Benghazi compound will be settled depends on the subsequent investigations, with the understanding that in hindsight, more could have always been done.
For its part, the administration has made a mess of its messaging after the attack, none of which has to do with the “Innocence of Muslims” movie or an apologist narrative that Romney initially accused the State Department of using. The State Department has left questions open about who was responsible for misstatements, consequent finger-pointing, and subsequently leaving itself open to Congressional scrutiny, some of which is bound to be partisan. To a point, some of this is inevitable with less than a month before an election and a fatal attack in a country where the U.S. has invested considerable capital. Part of the administration’s response, especially immediately after the attack, can be blamed on confusion in the “fog of war,” but as with any crisis, once the fog clears the message needs to clear along with it. But as Mark Lynch points out in Foreign Policy, unless new and devastating revelations are uncovered, none of this rises to the level of a full-blown scandal nor should it greatly change the legacy of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, or the State Department at large. Naturally the investigations should proceed, with the partisan caveats, but the short-term noise that they are creating should not outweigh the other possible long-term consequences.
The first consequence relates to the initial Twitter post that created the "apology" controversy, both for the administration and for the Romney campaign. The problem with the post from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was not that it was apologizing as Romney claimed, but that it had not been vetted through the proper channels. This is not trivial: anyone with experience in the State Department or any large bureaucracy knows how important it is to get any form of communication—even a thank-you note—cleared through the usual procedures. Like the debate about embassy security, the issue is finding a balance between the need to get the message exactly right versus the need to communicate quickly and through new media if possible. Those goals are usually incongruent, but they need to be reconciled if the State Department (rightfully) wants to exploit new media more completely. The Cairo Embassy tweet was a media relations disaster, even though an experienced senior public affairs officer was responsible for it, and this shows how important it will be to get this kind of messaging right. Going forward, the State Department will need to develop a protocol that balances a message’s speed with its diplomatic measure.
The second is the fact that, unlike the 2006 furor over the Danish cartoons, where anti-Western protests were met with more anti-Western protests, the protests in September were far smaller. In Libya, protests in opposition to the consulate attack were as large, if not larger, than the protests against the offending YouTube video. Even though we now know that the Benghazi attack was unrelated to protests or the video, the development is noteworthy and deserves more attention. The reasons and implications for this fact are complicated, better explained elsewhere, and in many ways beside the point, which is that politics, society, and the Muslim world’s relationship with the West have changed dramatically since the Arab Spring, never mind 2006. This is a major development that deserves more than reductions to stereotypes, arguments that Muslim societies are poorly adapted to dealing with controversy, or shallow analyses of whether they’re “with us or against us.”
As the American domestic controversy over the attack continues, it increasingly seems to take the shape of a clumsy attempt to manufacture an October Surprise. If so, then it is unfortunate that attention on the Benghazi attacks will dry up after November (unless the controversy is later used to sabotage Ambassador Susan Rice’s possible nomination to Secretary of State if Obama wins the election). The opportunity presented to better understand the use of social media as a diplomatic tool, and the opportunity to better understand the new political dynamics of the Middle East, should be a huge teaching moment, not just for American policy towards the Middle East, but also for how it conducts diplomacy in larger sense. That would be a far better legacy for an attack that killed four American citizens.
Photo: House Committee on Oversight Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) by RepublicanConference (cc).
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What is the Legacy of the Benghazi Attack?
October 22, 2012
Last week, the House Committee on Oversight held hearings on the “Security Failures at Benghazi” to investigate whether the level of security that the State Department provided at the Benghazi compound was consummate to the possible threat. Embassy security is obviously a huge issue, and it becomes even more so after a deadly attack that kills an ambassador. The fundamentals of that discussion lead to questions of the need to protect the safety of an embassy’s diplomats and employees versus the need project an open and positive image toward the host country. That debate will never be settled. Whether the specific debate about the safety of the Benghazi compound will be settled depends on the subsequent investigations, with the understanding that in hindsight, more could have always been done.
For its part, the administration has made a mess of its messaging after the attack, none of which has to do with the “Innocence of Muslims” movie or an apologist narrative that Romney initially accused the State Department of using. The State Department has left questions open about who was responsible for misstatements, consequent finger-pointing, and subsequently leaving itself open to Congressional scrutiny, some of which is bound to be partisan. To a point, some of this is inevitable with less than a month before an election and a fatal attack in a country where the U.S. has invested considerable capital. Part of the administration’s response, especially immediately after the attack, can be blamed on confusion in the “fog of war,” but as with any crisis, once the fog clears the message needs to clear along with it. But as Mark Lynch points out in Foreign Policy, unless new and devastating revelations are uncovered, none of this rises to the level of a full-blown scandal nor should it greatly change the legacy of Hillary Clinton, Susan Rice, or the State Department at large. Naturally the investigations should proceed, with the partisan caveats, but the short-term noise that they are creating should not outweigh the other possible long-term consequences.
The first consequence relates to the initial Twitter post that created the "apology" controversy, both for the administration and for the Romney campaign. The problem with the post from the U.S. Embassy in Cairo was not that it was apologizing as Romney claimed, but that it had not been vetted through the proper channels. This is not trivial: anyone with experience in the State Department or any large bureaucracy knows how important it is to get any form of communication—even a thank-you note—cleared through the usual procedures. Like the debate about embassy security, the issue is finding a balance between the need to get the message exactly right versus the need to communicate quickly and through new media if possible. Those goals are usually incongruent, but they need to be reconciled if the State Department (rightfully) wants to exploit new media more completely. The Cairo Embassy tweet was a media relations disaster, even though an experienced senior public affairs officer was responsible for it, and this shows how important it will be to get this kind of messaging right. Going forward, the State Department will need to develop a protocol that balances a message’s speed with its diplomatic measure.
The second is the fact that, unlike the 2006 furor over the Danish cartoons, where anti-Western protests were met with more anti-Western protests, the protests in September were far smaller. In Libya, protests in opposition to the consulate attack were as large, if not larger, than the protests against the offending YouTube video. Even though we now know that the Benghazi attack was unrelated to protests or the video, the development is noteworthy and deserves more attention. The reasons and implications for this fact are complicated, better explained elsewhere, and in many ways beside the point, which is that politics, society, and the Muslim world’s relationship with the West have changed dramatically since the Arab Spring, never mind 2006. This is a major development that deserves more than reductions to stereotypes, arguments that Muslim societies are poorly adapted to dealing with controversy, or shallow analyses of whether they’re “with us or against us.”
As the American domestic controversy over the attack continues, it increasingly seems to take the shape of a clumsy attempt to manufacture an October Surprise. If so, then it is unfortunate that attention on the Benghazi attacks will dry up after November (unless the controversy is later used to sabotage Ambassador Susan Rice’s possible nomination to Secretary of State if Obama wins the election). The opportunity presented to better understand the use of social media as a diplomatic tool, and the opportunity to better understand the new political dynamics of the Middle East, should be a huge teaching moment, not just for American policy towards the Middle East, but also for how it conducts diplomacy in larger sense. That would be a far better legacy for an attack that killed four American citizens.
Photo: House Committee on Oversight Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) by RepublicanConference (cc).
