Connecting the Dots

Remember our lead-from-behind "war" in Libya—you know, the one that deposed Mohamar Kaddafi and gave al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups free reign in that North African country?  Richard Fernandez points out an interesting article published in 2012 from Reuters:

(Reuters) - The Libyan civil war may have given militant groups in Africa's Sahel region like Boko Haram and al Qaeda access to large weapons caches, according to a U.N. report released on Thursday.

The report on the impact of the Libyan civil war on countries of the Sahel region that straddle the Sahara - including Nigeria, Niger and Chad - also says some national authorities believe the Islamist sect Boko Haram has increasing links to al Qaeda's North African wing. Boko Haram killed more than 500 people last year and more than 250 this year in Nigeria.

Boko Haram is the same Islamist terrorist group that has been in the news lately for abducting almost 300 Nigerian girls and selling them as sex-slaves. By the way, did you know that almost all of those girls were Christians and were forced to covert to Islam before they were violated.

Richard Fernandez comments:

In any case terror doth not live by word alone. It also requireth arms and ammunition. And that’s where Libya comes in. But wasn’t Libya overthrown by “kinetic military action” under the doctrine of “resonsibility to protect” in support of the “Arab Spring?” What are we to make of the fact that Boko Haram openly swears alliance to to al-Qaeda? According to CNN it’s leader “Shekau has declared his allegiance to al Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri.”

So ... in still another triumph of Obama administration foreign policy, it looks like some of the enormous cache of weapons that went missing (largely unreported at the time by Obama's trained media hamsters) after the Libyan "kinetic military action" is now in the hands of Boko Haram.

But it gets even worse. Again from Fernandez:

You know the place [Benghazi] where an American consulate got burned? Eli Lake at the Daily Beast wrote that “so many Jihadists are flocking to Libya, it’s becoming ‘Scumbag Woodstock’”.

Not only does al Qaeda host Ansar al-Sharia, one of the militias responsible for the Benghazi attacks that killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. But U.S. intelligence now assesses that leaders from at least three regional al Qaeda affiliates—al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and members of the organization of Al-Mulathameen Brigade loyal to Algerian terrorist, Mokhtar BelMokhtar—have all established havens in the lawless regions of Libya outside the control of the central government.

One U.S. military contractor working on counter-terrorism in Africa summed up the situation in Libya today as simply, “Scumbag Woodstock.” The country has attracted that star-studded roster of notorious terrorists and fanatics seeking to wage war on the West.

Which brings up that “phony” scandal, Benghazi. For months organizations like Media Matters proclaimed that there was nothing in that event, beyond the fact that some random Muslims inflamed by a video took it on themselves to attack a US consulate and kill an ambassador.

Once the lie was finally revealed by the investigations that the Dems roundly condemned, that meme disappeared. Now, we see virtually every Democrat scurrying to condemn the newly-formed Benghazi Select Committee, working hard to delegimitize the inquiry as political. The hypocrisy of that position is breathtaking. Sure, the GOP has a political agenda, but so do the Dems. At least the outcome of the GOP's politics is an attempt to understand why bald-faced lies were offered instead of the truth, whether those lies were predicated on election year politics, why Americans died with no attempt to save them, who the decision makers were that night, and what orders were given and who gave them.

In thinking about it, the Dems may be scared to death that further investigation will allow the public to learn about the abject failure of Obama's (and by virtue of her position, Hillary Clinton's) decisions in Libya long before Benghazi. The public might begin to connect the dots:

• lead-from-behind in Libya in 2012, no coherent plan, operation drags on
• no plan for a stable government once the dictator is overthrown
• predictable chaos follows
• Islamist terrorists flow into the country
• huge weapons cache goes missing including surface-to-air missiles (still missing)
• weapons wind up in the hands of al Qaeda and Boko Haram
• Hillary Clinton's state department refused to name Boko Haram a terrorist group in 2012
• Boko Haram used said weapons to terrorize and abuse Christian school girls in 2014
• Boko Haram used said weapons to kill (best guess) 4600 innocents in Nigeria since 2012

Yeah ... connecting those dots doesn't bode well for Ms. Clinton's foreign policy cred, so it's best to look the other way. "Nothing to see here, let's move on." Dems have been very good at that lately. No reason to change now.

ASIDE
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Ayann Hirsi Ali, a true women's right advocate , who is also an outspoken critic of Islam critic of Islam, comments on the atrocities perpetrated by Boko Haram in the name of Islam, and asks why liberal feminists don't do more to question the underlying Islamic beliefs that lead to the subjugation of woman. She writes:

I am often told that the average Muslim wholeheartedly rejects the use of violence and terror, does not share the radicals' belief that a degenerate and corrupt Western culture needs to be replaced with an Islamic one, and abhors the denigration of women's most basic rights. Well, it is time for those peace-loving Muslims to do more, much more, to resist those in their midst who engage in this type of proselytizing before they proceed to the phase of holy war.

It is also time for Western liberals to wake up. If they choose to regard Boko Haram as an aberration, they do so at their peril. The kidnapping of these schoolgirls is not an isolated tragedy; their fate reflects a new wave of jihadism that extends far beyond Nigeria and poses a mortal threat to the rights of women and girls. If my pointing this out offends some people more than the odious acts of Boko Haram, then so be it.