Bruce Riedel: Stop the Libya Blame Game

[DonViejo]

Oct 2, 2012 4:45 AM EDT

Sifting the ashes of an attack in revolutionary Arab states is hard. Time for the pols to cut the finger-pointing, and start offering plans to cope with a region in flux. By Bruce Riedel.

The tempest over what happened on Sept. 11, 2012 in Benghazi in the terror attack that killed four Americans and how it was portrayed by the administration after the fact masks a far more serious policy issue that will be a formidable challenge to the next president. The revolutions across Arabia in the last year and a half have created a dangerous chaos that al Qaeda and its allies are exploiting from Libya and Mali to Syria and Yemen. How we deal with the Arab revolutions and the resurgence of al Qaeda and the global jihad will be a defining problem in the next few years.

Policy and intelligence officials routinely have to brief the public, the media, and Congress on fast-breaking events about which they typically have incomplete and often inaccurate early accounts. Believe me, I’ve been there. Trying to discern who carried out a terrorist attack is especially difficult. It took more than a year after Pan Am 103 was blown up over Scotland before the evidence of Libyan intelligence responsibility emerged clearly. Rarely do we have the kind of high- quality intelligence we got right after 9/11 pointing to al Qaeda. Initial reports usually should be greeted with caution, and early readouts treated as preliminary. To call for the resignation of officials for providing accounts that are later overtaken by new information is silly.

Al Qaeda has been killing American diplomats in Africa since 1998, and they and their allies are likely to kill more. The revolutions that are sweeping away the old police states that dominated Arab politics for the last half century are an unintended but enormous boost to al Qaeda. The old police states, called mukhabarat states in Arabic, were authoritarian dictatorships that ruled their people arbitrarily and poorly. But they were good at fighting terror. Libya’s Gaddafi gave America significant help in the battle against al Qaeda.

In Egypt, Libya, and Yemen, the United States (and many other countries) worked closely for decades with the mukhabarat to fight al Qaeda. It may have been a devil’s bargain, but it was good counterterrorism. We still work closely with Saudi and Jordanian intelligence to fight al Qaeda. The Saudis have thwarted at least two attacks on our homeland since 2010; the Jordanians help us fight across the region and one of their officers died with ours in al Qaeda’s attack that killed seven CIA officers in Afghanistan in 2009. So we still need our partners.

read more:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2012/10/02/bruce-riedel-stop-the-libya-blame-game.html