Why Obama
Didn't Send In The Troops
By DICK MORRIS
Published on
DickMorris.com on May 13, 2013
Why didn't Obama order troops to Benghazi to protect what remained of
our diplomatic delegation and their security staff? The only known
communication between the president and the Defense Secretary during the
attack took place about one and one half hours after the assault began.
Why didn't Obama call for reinforcements?
More to the point, as the attack escalated and its dimensions became
clearer, why didn't Defense Secretary Leon Panetta ask him for authority
to order relief for the beleaguered mission? Why didn't he even
ask?
Clearly, the president must have been pretty firm in his one meeting
with Panetta that he did not want to send in more troops to rescue those
already on the ground in Benghazi. He must have made it so plain
that the Secretary did not think it necessary -- and perhaps didn't dare
-- to ask if his hands-off instruction still stood.
What was the president's motivation?
It comes as no surprise that eight weeks before an election, it was
political, but how and why?
To grasp Obama's state of mind at the time, we have to realize that he
had to win the vote of every last supporter in order to prevail.
His campaign was not about swing voters, but about a 100% turnout of his
base. Every last African-American, Latino, single mother, and gay
voter had to come out and vote or he would not win.
Another key part of his base was the anti-war voters. It was,
after all, his opposition to the Iraq War which propelled him into
contention against Hillary Clinton in 2007-2008. From the start of
his Libyan intervention, he must have worried that he would alienate his
supporters by starting another war.
In a profile of President Obama by Vanity Fair's Michael Lewis suggested
that he was obsessed with avoiding any casualties as he sought to lead
the war "from behind." Lewis noted that casualties in Libya might
create a narrative about how "a president elected to extract us from a
war in one Arab country got Americans killed in another."
So Obama must have felt he had to lean over backwards not to put more
boots on the ground lest they lead to the dreaded casualties. At
the time of his meeting with Panetta, Obama did not know that the
ambassador was dead and the others who would fall that day had not yet
been hit.
So the bottom line is this: President Obama was so anxious to
preserve his reputation as a peace candidate that he resisted calls for
intervention which might have saved -- and, to be fair, could have cost
additional -- American lives. He certainly put politics first.
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