The real lesson of Benghazi will not be learned,' Paul says. | AP Photo
Ron Paul on Monday dismissed Republican and White House claims about Benghazi as a “sideshow” and said GOP criticisms on the issue are politically motivated.
“Republicans smell a political opportunity over evidence that the administration heavily edited initial intelligence community talking points about the attack to remove or soften anything that might reflect badly on the president or the State Department,” Paul, a libertarian-leaning former Republican congressman and presidential candidate, charged in a column posted on Monday.
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His comments came as reports indicated that official talking points about the deadly Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, had been stripped of references to terrorism. President Barack Obama, for his part, on Monday rejected criticism over the talking points as a “sideshow.” Paul, too, used that word — but in a very different context.
“The real lesson of Benghazi will not be learned because neither Republicans nor Democrats want to hear it,” he concluded. “But it is our interventionist foreign policy and its unintended consequences that have created these problems, including the attack and murder of Ambassador Stevens. The disputed talking points and White House whitewashing are just a sideshow.”
Paul’s son, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), on Friday took a different tack, laying responsibility with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
She is “absolutely responsible,” the younger Paul, considered a possible 2016 candidate, said last week. “She was in charge of the State Department. She was asked repeatedly for increased security for Benghazi. Some of the media have been reporting that because she didn’t read them she’s protected – she wasn’t responsible because she didn’t read them? I fault her absolutely for not reading the cables.”
The elder Paul, a vocal critic of interventionist foreign policy, noted that many Republicans had supported the Obama administration’s 2011 military actions in Libya that contributed to the fall of Muammar Qadhafi. Those steps, he argued, helped facilitate last fall’s attacks in Benghazi, which killed the American ambassador, Chris Stevens, as well as three other Americans.
“Who can blame the administration for wanting to shift the focus?” Paul wrote. “The Islamic radicals who attacked Benghazi were the same people let loose by the US-led attack on Libya. They were the rebels on whose behalf the US overthrew the Libyan government. Ambassador Stevens was slain by the same Islamic radicals he personally assisted just over one year earlier.”
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