Why does benghazi matter

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Thank you! For your security, we've sent a confirmation email to the address you entered. Click the link to confirm your subscription and begin receiving our newsletters. If you don't get the confirmation within 10 minutes, please check your spam folder. And Trump is not alone in making the Benghazi analogy. Multiple media outlets from across the political spectrum have made the comparison.

On a superficial level, the comparison holds—both are American diplomatic outposts in the Arab world attacked by angry throngs—and both are rife with symbolic significance. For the president and his supporters, the analogy highlights a success. Benghazi ended in disaster whereas Baghdad proved successful, thanks to a timely and robust American military response to reinforce a post under siege. To the president's critics, the analogy has the opposite connotation—yet another data point proving that American Middle East policy has failed.

Both sides, however, arguably miss the point. For starters, there is the matter of size and scale. Benghazi was not a full-fledged embassy. It was a relatively small post comprised of a Temporary Mission Facility and Annex a mile away PDF , with only a few dozen Americans present at the time of the attack in October By contrast, the U.

The clash outside of the embassy in Baghdad was not just a terrorist attack, but a battle in a much larger proxy war playing out between the United States and Iran. Then, there was a question of the adversary.

The mob that attacked Benghazi was a mixture of diverse jihadi and militia groups. By contrast, the crowd that attacked the U. Embassy in Baghdad was from news accounts more unified and in some ways more formidable, linked to Iranian-sponsored militia Kata'ib Hezbollah and other pro-Iranian factions. Indeed, the very fact that the crowd responded to an order to withdraw indicates that this was more than a mob. The clash outside of the embassy in Baghdad then was not just a terrorist attack, but a battle in a much larger proxy war playing out between the United States and Iran.

The overarching political contexts are also different. After the fall of Libyan strongman Muammar Gaddafi, Libya lacked a central authority capable of governing the country.

Consequently, by the time of the Benghazi attacks, the United States could not expect much from Libya. The annex then was attacked twice, and two more Americans were killed: CIA security contractors Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty, who had been defending the building from the rooftop. Security officials who came from the Libyan capital of Tripoli, along with Libyan military troops, helped evacuate the rest of the U.

All told, the attack happened over the course of about eight hours at the two locations. This has been a point of contention. The attack came the year after Libya's civil war, which was part of a larger protest movement across the Middle East and North Africa.

On that day, demonstrators in other Muslim countries were protesting outside U. Susan Rice, then-U. Embassy in Cairo. She was telling the truth — a CIA assessment in those early days had indeed found that was the case, but that information turned out to be wrong.

The Benghazi attackers, then-acting CIA Director Michael Morell later said, were actually a ragtag, disorganized group of militants who decided at the spur of the moment to storm the compound amid the chaos in Libya following its civil war.

While congressional investigations determined the initial CIA review was an honest mistake, Republicans have seized the switch in explanation as an opportunity to blame the Obama administration of a cover-up for failing to protect Americans.

The controversy reached such high fever pitch, it forced Rice to withdraw her name from consideration for secretary of state. It also led to the discovery of Hillary Clinton's use of private email servers, and more recently, killed House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy's hopes of becoming the new Speaker of the House after he publicly linked the committee investigating the attack with Clinton's faltering poll numbers, implying the committee's findings were motivated by politics.

At this point, what difference does it make? The difference, opponents have argued, is whether or not the attack was preventable.