|
|
|
Jewish World Review December 18, 2012/ 5 Teves, 5773 A welcome decision: Congratulations, Madam Ambassador By Paul Greenberg
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Who says the Hon. For good reason. Call it a tacit admission that she hadn't been suited for the job from the first. She demonstrated just how unsuited not long ago by the royal botch she made of "explaining" what had happened to four of our best at Benghazi: They were slaughtered. Time and again, Ms. Rice had gone before the television cameras to repeat her talking points about that bloody debacle and what had caused it. We were supposed to believe that this murderous attack was the result of a tumultuous demonstration against an amateurish anti-Muslim video produced in this country -- even as it became clear that her version of events was largely fiction. And that in reality our people were the victims of a well-planned assault that should have been anticipated and could have been avoided. Ambassador Rice's unconvincing performance came at a convenient time for a The ambassador's account of what had happened at Benghazi was already proving untenable even as she delivered it. And it would soon prove a major embarrassment. In the end, the only useful thing provided by her misadventure in public relations was a cautionary tale about the dangers of politicizing American diplomacy. The ambassador may have fooled some of the people, or even herself, for some of the time -- a very brief time in her case -- but at a heavy price: She destroyed her own credibility. And that of the administration. Who could believe anything she had to say after that? If the assault at Benghazi could have been blamed on some dolt who'd made a stupid video, it might have been enough to insulate the president from charges of incompetence -- at least till If she had been nominated for secretary of state, those television appearances of hers would have been rehashed again and again in her confirmation hearings, and her humiliation made complete. At least she's now had the good sense to get out of the public spotlight while the getting out was good. The president should never have put her there -- and then left her to slowly twist in the wind as one revelation about Benghazi followed another.
A worldly diplomat should have learned better after all these years, but it turns out that years of service in the diplomatic corps is not the same as experience -- or the capacity to learn from it. And now she's no longer up for secretary of state, for which she and the country should be grateful. But that doesn't mean a healthy curiosity about what went wrong and why at Benghazi should be discouraged. Quite the contrary. Whatever the career prospects of the Hon.
But that doesn't mean the inquisitive senator from If we don't learn the truth about that whole sad affair, and learn from it, we stand to lose more outstanding diplomats like There was a time when
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Send your comments by clicking here.
© 2010 Tribune Media Services, Inc. |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||||
