Bombing spurred by fears of another Benghazi

The New York Times (no less) provides quite an insight into why President Obama decided to resume bombing in Iraq: He didn’t want to repeat the mistakes he made in Benghazi.

According to the Times this morning, the president was in the back of his limo Wednesday evening and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had the president’s ear. He told the president that not only were the good people in the Kurdish capital of Erbil in the path of ISIS, so were American business-folk and diplomats at the American Consulate.

“Looming over that discussion”, the Times reports, was the “specter of an earlier tragedy: the September 2012 attack on the diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, which killed four Americans, including Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, and has become a potent symbol of weakness for critics of the president.”

Two things of note in this revealing story: 1) Obama and his team admit that their lack of preparation and subsequent inaction in Benghazi were mistakes, and 2) the return to bombing in Iraq is a good political move for his popularity numbers. Reinforces all my biases about this president.

Read the story for yourself here. It’s quite revealing.

PS: Is bombing enough. Boots on the ground may be the only way to save Erbil. If that happens, head-spinning liberals will have screwed themselves completely in the ground.