The author argues convincingly that instead of a landmark event to be
taken seriously and seriously analysed, the assassination of Stevens
became a punchline, an empty word shouted with anger and frustration, or
code for controversy and political theatre with Hillary Clinton as
primary target.
Chorin is the right man to conduct an enquiry on the fateful events
in Benghazi: a former diplomat, he was posted to Tripoli in 2004-2006;
he knows Libya and its inhabitants well. Chorin is also a political
analyst, author and environmental entrepreneur whose books on Libya and
articles in the New York Times, The Financial Times, Foreign Affairs and
Forbes carry authority. A fluent Arabic, French and Persian speaker, he
has built up a vast array of friends and professional acquaintances in
over 30 years of working in the US, Libya and the Middle East. His
experience and expertise give a quasi -anthropological texture to a book
which reads like a fast-paced thriller, although at times the reader
gets lost in the sheer complexity of groups, subgroups and tribal
connections that make up that vast, underpopulated country that we know
as Libya.
The part of Benghazi! which explains how and why the way
America responded to Libya impacted the country’s response to events in
Syria, Yemen and Iran is not always easy to read. Though the conclusions
are clear, it is probably a narrative deserving of another book.
What is intriguing and highly relevant today is the manifest
confusion of Washington’s understanding of political Islam. Chorin
writes: “The Benghazi attack – and the scandal it produced – are
intimately tied up with the concept of political Islam and America’s
inconsistent relationship with it.”
Fast track back to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the
Cold War was at an inflection point and the United States “saw an
opportunity to draw the Kremlin into its own Vietnam war, by providing
arms, training and supplies to the mujahideen – and even helped fund
recruitment schemes….” The US thought that if it could engage the Muslim
Brotherhood, perhaps “it could pull the whole movement away from its
most extreme edges, and temper organisations like Al Qaeda in the
process.” A long-term price was paid, as many of these battle-hardened
fighters coalesced around Osama bin Laden and the Egyptian extremist
scholar Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who together founded Al Qaeda in 1986. The
dangerously naïve assumption that radical Islamists would end their war
against “infidels” with the defeat of the USSR in Afghanistan was
shortly to receive a rude and brutal awakening: “With one of the two
world superpowers gone, America was the next obvious target.”
In a chapter entitled “Setting up Blowback,” Chorin quotes John
Cooley who wrote, in his classic book on the Afghan war that “when you
decide to go to war against your current main enemy, take a good, long
look at the people behind you whom you choose as your friends. Look well
to see whether these allies already have unleashed their daggers – and
are pointing them at your backs.” Al Qaeda’s warning that it was taking
jihad from the near enemy to the far enemy came in 1998 but America paid
no heed.
As Chorin notes, the alliance with the mujahideen in Afghanistan was
repeated with disastrous consequences in Libya. By the mid-90s, the US
and the United Kingdom had recruited the jihadist LIFG (Libyan Islamic
Fighting Group) to power their plans to get rid of the Libyan dictator
Muammar Gaddafi. (Some claim that British intelligence’s relationship
was at least partly motivated by the fear the LIFG might ultimately
start planning attacks on London, so engagement with them would create a
kind of immunity.)
Post 9/11, however the Americans and the British decided that Gaddafi
could be flipped from bad guy to buddy. Chorin writes with irony: “M16
was working hand in glove with the Americans and the Gaddafi regime
which it had once been so hard pressed to overthrow with LIFG help.”
The LIFG was not only surplus to requirements, it was a liability. So
leading members in exile, including Abdulhakim Belhaj, were turned over,
“renditioned”, to the Libyan dictator. Belhaj, who was tortured badly
along with his heavily pregnant wife stands at the heart of the Libyan
extraordinary rendition story, its most prominent victim – and,
ultimately, perhaps its most prominent beneficiary.
It is a measure of the shallow thinking of both America and Britain
that such people could be relied upon as faithful allies. It says
something too about how abruptly Belhaj and his ilk were betrayed. And
it is telling how badly both countries misread Gaddafi with the bland
assumption that he was now one of ours. Just seven years after Tony
Blair’s infamous meeting with Gaddafi in the desert outside Tripoli, the
US and the UK were instrumental in his removal.
As Chorin with acuity points out, Libya was not well known to the US:
decades of not having diplomatic relations were followed by the Iraq
war which, after 2003 sucked up all the energy (and Middle East
specialists) of the great departments of US State. Most foreign policy
people in Washington thought Gaddafi was “simply a lunatic, or an idiot,
or both. We certainly did not know much about the Gaddafi family
dynamics….”. North Africa had a limited budget at both the State
Department and the CIA, and the Algerian civil war took up the lion’s
share of intelligences resources in the 1990s. Chorin notes that “the
CIA and certainly British intelligence (because of their) past
collaboration with the LIFG, were aware of both Gaddafi’s war with the
LIFG and the LIFG’s connections to Al Qaeda.” Gaddafi would provide the
UK and the US with a Who’s Who of the LIFG leadership; they tracked them
down and handed them back to the dictator. So while the US (and the UK)
were framing a deal with Gaddafi as a step toward reform and democracy
promotion, behind the scenes it was violating the basic human rights of
suspected terrorists whilst in pursuit of bin Laden’s future terror
campaigns.
Chorin concludes an enthralling read with the thought that the
killing of the ambassador and three other Americans needs to be seen,
not as something to be walked away from, “an odd historical footnote,”
but as an object lesson in how diplomacy and foreign policy failed
because ignorance and arrogance flourished. In calling for fundamental
change to the way America perceives and treats with the Middle East and
North Africa his book lays down a bold and refreshing challenge.