Iamon lyme:

> There is absolutely no intel to confirm the Benghazi attack was a peaceful protest
> (inspired by a video) that somehow erupted into violence. The Libyan leaders knew it
> was a planned attack and our state department knew it was a planned attack.

The Benghazi attack is the result of a foreign policy which follows a failed principle: "the enemy of my enemy is my friend". The Obama administration is using a foreign policy principle which had its birth during the Cold War and which was refined during the Reagan administration.

If "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", then I can give this "friend" money, weapons and training to attack my enemy so that I may achieve my foreign policy objectives.

Some 15,000 posts ago I mentioned that at the time the government in Chad had claimed that western intelligence agencies were recruiting mercenaries out of Chad's insurgency, a paramilitary group organized by Al Qaeda to overthrown governments in North Africa. Al Qaeda in the Magreb had been trying to overthrow the governments of Egypt, Algeria, Lybia and Chad for the better part of 8 years. At the time nobody paid heed to Chad's claim and my post went for the most part unnoticed.

I also posted something alarming that had happened in Lybia. The opposition claimed that a lot of weapons were disappearing. Nato was supplying the oppositiong with weapons and those weapons were vanishing into thin air.

I also posted another thing that said that there had been two incidents of "friendly fire" in which Nato forces bombed opposition forces "mistakenly" thinking that they were part of Gaddafi's army.

Adding two and two together it is obvious that Al Qaeda had infiltrated the Lybian opposition, it had stolen weapons from them, and in an attempt to solve the problem Nato decided to bomb the culprits. Obviously Nato failed.

Now Al Qaeda is free to roam Lybia since Gaddafi is not there to stop them. People forget things easily. Not long ago (3 years?) Prince Andrew was havily criticized for going to Lybia and signing business deals with the Lybian government. Both France and the UK were eager to do business in Lybia and to buy Lybian oil from Gaddafi. Why would they have been willing to do so when Gaddafi was the enemy? The reason is that Gaddafi was not the enemy. He was an ally in the War on Terror. Part of extraordinary rendition was sending detainees to third countries to be tortured and interrogated. Two of the main destinations were Lybia and Syria. Gaddafi was quite happy to crush Al Qaeda because Gaddafi wanted to maintain his secular government.

So we see the great intelligence failure: the enemy (Al Qaeda) of my enemy (Gaddafi) is my friend. Now that Gaddafi is gone, Al Qaeda sees an opportunity to attain their objective and destabilize the Lybian government until it collapses.

The attack in Benghazi was carefully planned. It is impossible to attack an American diplomatic mission without a plan because American diplomatic missions are heavily guarded.

It is not the first time that Western intelligence agencies completely fail in using this style of foreign policy. The Moujahaideen were America's allies against the Soviet Union. Now they are the Taliban and Al Qaeda. The US used opposition groups in Iraq against Saddam Hussain. Now Al Qaeda is alive and well in Iraq, even though it had never been Iraq prior to the war. In Lybia Al Qaeda is now armed and dangerous and the Benghazi attack is probably not the last. The Syrian and Lebanese governments are now claiming that the Syrian opposition has been infiltrated by Al Qaeda. In spite of that western intelligence agencies are giving money and weapons to the opposition.

The pattern is clear, and the Obama administrations failure is in repeating the same pattern that started with Ronald Reagan, continued in full with George W. Bush, and now is turning the Middle East into an even bigger mess under the Obama administration. The question is whether Obama will change his approach or whether Romney would do any better.