Further, he has broadcast to all our enemies and potential enemies that he is tepid, flabby, reticent and largely disinterested in Gloabl Power Politics.

Lucky us. Lucky world. SHAMELESS Moral Cowardice.

The massive & costly Victory in Iraq was completely ABANDONED by B.Hussein Obama. The Surge and its aftermath worked. Obama, who claims(cough)to have “ended the War in Iraq”, in fact–bottom line–RETREATED from that Victory and Stability. Say, for example, if the US had withdrawn in total from the hard won victory in Korea. Shameful beyond expressing.

President Bush: Large Thundering Cojones.

President Obama: Vast Testicular Concavity.

No, I asked how many ambassadors. Try a reading comprehension course before posting here. Of course maybe your reading comprehension is great and you deliberately changed it.

“I don’t accept the premise that any of what the Obama administration said afterwards had any political advantage.”

Sure, it’s not like he was running on his claims of thwarting terrorism or anything.

That’s true, but it was made considerably more complex by these errors. Just as you correctly realized the Benghazi attack was likely carried out by militants, I correctly foresaw the Iraq War was going to be far more difficult than the Administration thought, and more specifically I correctly foresaw the disastrous effect of disbanding the Iraqi Army; at the time I was flabbergasted by the move. So yes, of course I agree the situation was bigger and more complex, but that just made the obvious (to me) mistakes even more consequential, with much more disastrous effects down the line.

To my mind, mistakes with gigantic consequences are far more worrisome than what appears to be mistakes regarding the security of a single diplomatic mission in a country which is largely friendly to the United States at present. The President is responsible primarily for these larger decisions, it seems to me, not as much for operational security at a small scale at every diplomatic mission, much as the way this was handled both prior to the attack and afterwards raises legitimate questions.

It still seems a bit odd to many of us on the leftward side, however, that there just seems to be a double standard here: the Iraq War deposed a somewhat more secular dictator with a democratically elected Islamist government which is rather friendly to Iran, a country which is a legitimate and serious threat to the region. Why is there not the same level of objective concern about this as there is about a similar situation in Egypt? The Libyan conflict, by contrast, deposed a dictator who had engaged in terrorist attacks against Western targets, and their government is now run by relatively pro-Western secularists. Not only this but the Libyan intervention cost a few orders of magnitude less in dollars, and zero American lives. While I am open to the argument that the Egyptian situation is still murky, I can’t see a strong argument that the Libyan situation is much of anything but a clear win for our side. However, I agree, it is probably too time-consuming to engage in a lengthy debate in your own comments section, and I apologize if I’ve pulled you too far into that here. I do appreciate the efforts you’ve made here, and I apologize for not having the time right now to read every one of your posts… though I do wish I did have the time, actually.

One big difference is that Iraq was an extremely difficult and exceedingly complex situation. The Benghazi attack was neither—and basic and very ordinary security precautions were not followed, either beforehand or during, and then it was both covered up and lied about in order to win re-election.

And one of the very worst things about Benghazi is the fact that the media was and still is complicit in the cover-up. As I wrote today, here:

Power-hungry and/or incompetent politicians count on the ignorance and/or inattention of the public. Sometimes the press functions to hold those politicians in check by informing the public what’s going on, but not now–at least, not where the Democrats are concerned.

Obama has been one of the very worst presidents in foreign policy in my lifetime. Again, I’m not going to argue with you about it; a waste of time at the moment. My views, and the reasons behind them, are quite well documented on this blog already.

Without doing the research into all the embassy attacks during the Iraq and Afghan war, I won’t dispute your research there, Neo. But what strikes me as so odd about this is that you seem to ignore what appear to most of us on the left side of the political spectrum dramatic and vast levels of incompetence, mismanagement, and mistakes on the part of Bush’s foreign policy throughout his tenure, the consequences of which are orders of magnitude more significant. The list is quite long: talking about a failure to respond in an aggressive manner to the threats in Benghazi vs the failure to respond in an aggressive manner to the situation with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the false conclusion that Saddam Hussein had WMDs, the mind-boggling failure related to disbanding the Iraqi Army, the lack of preparation for the aftermath of the Iraq invasion, the lack of attention to finding and capturing Osama bin Laden, and on and on. Each of these issues have been commented on and reported on and discussed in depth by foreign policy analysts on both the right and the left, and they represent failures which dwarf, by a huge degree, in scope and significance, the mistakes the State Department and CIA made in Benghazi, it seems to me, by nearly any objective standard. These mistakes led to thousands, tens of thousands of deaths both of our own soldiers and personnel and of innocent civilians.

And this is not to say that only Bush made mistakes. Every president, from both parties, have made terrible mistakes. On balance, I’d say that Obama has been, in the large, very effective at foreign policy. This one incident is, to my mind, an indication of clear errors, but I still can’t see how it’s remotely of any great significance in the grand scheme of security and/or intelligence fuckups.

Oh, and the car bomb that killed diplomat David Foy happened in the parking lot of the Marriot Hotel in Karachi. Absolutely no relevance to Benghazi whatsoever.

No one here is suggesting that a president—either Bush or Obama or any other president—has to have zero casualties in the diplomatic corps on his/her watch (although zero casualties would be nice). But not all violent incidents/attacks are alike. Benghazi has characteristics that are completely unique and indicate truly astounding negligence and then mendacity. Nothing of the sort happened with Bush.

Actually, I think you know that, and are hoping we’re too lazy to look up the facts.

No, I still believe Reagan was to the left of the Republican Party today, but I also believe I don’t care enough to engage in an interminable debate about this one person in which one could take any given point and interpret it endlessly in whatever way suits your fancy.

By more objective measures the Republican Party has moved significantly to the right in recent years:

http://voteview.com/blog/?p=494

(scroll down to the see the graph). The Democratic Party has also moved to the left (contrary to the view of many on the left, which I can tell you perceives the Democratic Party as having moved right.)

That’s a more interesting set of measurements than an abstract debate about Reagan.