The Libyan Consulate Attack And More Twilight Zone Behavior From Nancy Pelosi

Nancy Pelosi was at it again last week, with another of her bombastic and silly comments about reality. In an interview on CNN, Ms. Pelosi confidently and inanely stated that the reason the U.S. consulate in Libya was attacked and destroyed, resulting in the murder of four Americans including our Libyan ambassador, was directly related to the fact that Republicans in Congress had cut the State Department budget by $300 million. Huh?

Ms. Pelosi failed to mention some facts about the current reality, or more likely, did not know or understand the current facts and math:

• Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, submitted her organization’s fiscal year 2013 budget request in the document, “Congressional Budget Justification, Volume 1, Department of State Operations, Fiscal Year 2013,” which can be accessed at:

      http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/181061.pdf

• In that budget document request, she asked for $51.6 billion for 2013 to operate the State Department’s functions.
• Thus, even if Pelosi’s claim is a correct number, that $300 million number is only .58% of the overall State Department budget request. I find it very difficult to believe that the State Department, if it knew how to do its job and was in touch with the security reality on the ground in Libya, could not find enough money in its $51 billion budget to protect the Libyan consulate and the Americans serving there. $300 million is such a small amount relative to its overall budget.
• In her own budget analysis, Secretary of State Clinton brags about how her budget request reduces the 2013 budget view by $300 million for local health programs, $300 million on humanitarian programs, and millions of more dollars for other State Department Programs so there obviously was an opportunity to already reduce State Department expenses and budgets, it was not just Republicans in Congress who thought there could be some budget belt tightening in the State Department budget.
• As a result of the budget deal he struck last August with Congress, the President was required to submit budget cuts that he felt were satisfactory and fit the need of that budget agreement. His recent recommendations including cutting the State Department budget by $129 million, so it is not only the Republicans in Congress that thought there could be a budget belt tightening at the State Department, the President thought so also.
• Ms. Pelosi fails to mention that this country spends hundreds of billions of dollars on our military every year. If the State Department did not have enough funds to defend the consulate in Libya, I am sure that the Department of Defense could have spared a handful of military personnel and resources to defend the consulate. To blame the Republicans in Congress when these military resources were available really stretches the boundaries of logic and sanity.

As always when discussing Ms. Pelosi’s views and statements, you really end up trying to figure out what her world is like, as we did in the following post:

http://loathemygovernment.blogspot.com/2010/12/nancy-pelosi-comedy-central-or-syfy.html

You cannot blame relatively small budget cuts done in Washington on a terrorist attack in Libya when those reputed budget cuts were very, very small relative to the overall budget, when the head of the State Department had already asked for budget cuts that were larger than what Pelosi claims the Republican insisted on, when the President himself asks for budget cuts that were almost half of what Pelosi claims the Republicans insisted on, and when there would be more than enough military resources available that could be placed in Libya to protect the consulate and Americans.

In fact, using Pelois's logic, I could make the budget argument that if the Obama administration had not wasted billions of dollars on crony-based, failure plagued alternative energy misadventures (Solyndra, Spectra, Evergreen, ENER1, A123, Fisker, Telsa, Abound, ECOTality, etc.), before he secured our embassies and consulates around the world, he is to blame for the Libyan attacks and death.

This was not a budget problem as Pelosi would like us to somehow believe. It was a failure of this administration to protect American citizens even though the administration knew that the situation was tenuous and needed to be addressed from a security perspective. However, for some unknown and obviously flawed reasons, proper precautions were not taken on the ground or in the State Department:

• According to a CNN report from September 17, 2012, a local Libyan security official had told American diplomats three days before the consulate attack that the security situation was “deteriorating.”
• Jamal Mabrouk told CNN that he warned the U.S. diplomats that “the situation is frightening.”
• Mr. Mabrouk claims that this was not the first time in the recent past that he had warned foreigners of the danger and the worsening security situation.
• The same CNN article also reported that heavy machine guns and rocket -propelled grenades were used in the attack, indicating that this was a planned, coordinated heavy assault attack, not a movie trailer protest that got out of hand.
• Even worse, the Washington Post reported last week that there had been at least two previous bomb explosions at the consulate and “dozens of other security threats” in the recent past and that the consulate officials had repeatedly requested increased security resources, requests that had either been denied or ignored.

This disaster and these four fatalities were not a budget failure, they were a security and State Department operations failure. To say otherwise is to ignore the root causes of this problem that need to be addressed so that this does not happen again and more Americans needlessly die.

For Ms. Pelosi to try and divert attention from the real problems, flawed mentality, and root causes this administration and State Department exhibited in this situation will solve nothing. It only continues to make her look like she is disconnected from the reality of the Middle East and our world, and will endanger future diplomats and their staffs, all for the sake of trying to make some political points. Pathetic.

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