David Brooks can tell a perfectly lucid story, you know, when he feels like it, especially when it's more or less true—truthfulness being a good writer's most elegant technique for achieving verisimilitude, though little appreciated.
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| Mosaic from Leptis Magna, Libya, via Mosaik. |
Not that he's off the hook for today—in fact he turns out to be more than usually slimy—but truthful lucidity is one of the things he does with his column on Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman at the center of the BENGHAZI! scandal, as some have called it:
It’s always odd watching someone you know get turned into a political cartoon on the cable talk shows. But this case is particularly disturbing because Nuland did nothing wrong.
Nuland is one of those rare cases of a foreign service political capable of serving as a professional, or the other way around. She belongs by
marriage to the keyboard-wielding warrior clan of the Kagans, and has been known to grace with her presence those legendary
vast spaces where Brooks entertains, but she has worked for Democrats as well as some of the most vicious Republicans (Cheney), and even the
most hostile commentators from the left do not seem to question her competence. It is the crazies that are accusing her, like the
Gateway Pundit*:
It’s very clear today that lib Victoria Nuland was not honest with reporters.
*I believe a Gateway Pundit is one that is basically harmless in and of him- or herself, but can lead the user to serious abuse of more serious and addictive pundits. I had a friend who started reading Megan McArdle. "I just do a paragraph," he said. That was months ago, and it's almost that long since he left his basement.Whether Brooks is sincerely just trying to exculpate his pal, or whether he is opening up a new foreign-policy front in the intraparty battle between the Brooks Brothers and the Mountain Men, he's plainly right: Nuland is innocent of the charges.
Let’s review the actual events. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed on Tuesday, Sept. 11, 2012. For this there is plenty of blame to go around. We now know, thanks to reporting by Eric Schmitt, Helene Cooper and Michael Schmidt in The Times, that Benghazi was primarily a C.I.A. operation. Furthermore, intelligence officers underestimated how dangerous the situation was.
OK. It's a little weird to say "we now know" the elements of an article that was published on Sept. 23, two weeks after the attack, but he gives us the link so we can ascertain that (I wonder if that nice young Monsignor Douthat is teaching him some manners?).
In any case, it's true. I knew it was a CIA fuckup too, because I was in one of my bouts of reading
Marcy Wheeler.
On Friday evening of Sept. 14, the updated talking points were e-mailed to the relevant officials in various departments, including Nuland. She wondered why the C.I.A. was giving members of Congress talking points that were far more assertive than anything she could say or defend herself. She also noted that the talking points left the impression that the C.I.A. had issued all sorts of warnings before the attack.
"Assertive" means in the first place in making the claim that the Benghazi attack was actually a demonstration against a video. If you look at the ABC edition of the talking points (
see page 2, at 4:42 PM) you will see there can be no doubt that whatever the CIA is trying to do here is self-serving, with the shadow of the king of self-service, the DCI Called Petraeus, looming behind. I mean, it's that gross.
Remember, this was at a moment when the State Department was taking heat for what was mostly a C.I.A. operation, while doing verbal gymnastics to hide the C.I.A.’s role. Intentionally or not, the C.I.A. seemed to be repaying the favor by trying to shift blame to the State Department for ignoring intelligence.
Indeed.
Nuland didn’t seek to rewrite the talking points. In fact, if you look at the drafts that were written while she was sending e-mails, the drafts don’t change much from one to the next. She was just kicking the process up to the policy-maker level. At this point, Nuland’s participation in the whole affair ends.
And Q.E.D. But does Brooks go on to join Emptywheel and the rest of us and try to figure just what monstrosity the agency and Petraeus were trying to keep hidden, what probably illegal escapades they were up to in eastern Libya in the first place (remember the CIA isn't an intelligence agency any more but a secret army with its own drone force and hired mercenary soldiers in every country in the world), how they failed to see this murderous raid coming, why they failed to stop it (why was there a need to call in reinforcements from Tripoli when there were a dozen or whatever fully armed Agency guys on the site?), and so on? Does he note how his observations exculpate not just Nuland but also Susan Rice, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and even (gasp!) Father Brennan? Not really.
Is this a tale of hard intelligence being distorted for political advantage? Maybe. Did Victoria Nuland scrub the talking points to serve Clinton or President Obama? That charge is completely unsupported by the evidence.
That is, not to say that Clinton or Obama was not somehow served, but it's none of
my business—I'm just Mr. Humble Political Philosopher, slumming down here today on behalf of somebody I see at parties once in a while, nothing political, no sir, about
me.
