How Do We Make Sense of Obama's, Clinton's and Panetta's Actions During the Benghazi Attack?

From PJM:

While the Obama administration was quick to blame the movie, they have been slow to explain what they were actually doing during the 10-hour attack, and who was involved in what. Defense Secretary Panetta has testified that he was not in contact with either President Obama or Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as the attack unfolded, and despite the fact that it was being monitored in real-time in Washington. The attack would also have weighed heavily on the minds of the president’s re-election campaign advisers. It could cost him and them their jobs.

Does it make any sense that on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil, that as another terrorist attack transpires, in a country bearing the fingerprints of Obama and Clinton after their air war helped oust Muammar Gaddafi, that POTUS, SecDef, and SecState all decided not to discuss the attack and coordinate a response? Does it make any sense for a secretary of State to handle the attack without communicating with her counterpart at the Pentagon, who would have been in charge of any military response to it? Does it make any sense for Panetta to green-light or red-light any response without consulting the commander-in-chief? Does he even have such authority?

None of that makes any sense. It’s inconceivable that the top three U.S. officials who would be accountable for the American lives and property at Benghazi would not communicate with each other during an ongoing attack. If she had nothing to hide, Clinton should have been climbing the walls until Obama authorized a serious and forceful response to rescue her friend Chris Stevens. Panetta should have been responding to Obama’s orders to bring our people home if possible, or disperse or kill the attackers if it wasn’t.

Yet Panetta says that after the 5 p.m. meeting he never communicated with either Obama or Clinton. If this is true, were they not derelict in their duties? Obama cannot have been unaware of the scale of the attack: We had a drone overhead and security cameras on the ground, and our forces on the ground were telling Washington what was happening. The fog of war was not very thick.

When the Benghazi attack occurred, Barack Obama was less than two months away from his reckoning with the voters. The polls were tight and any event could have moved them one way or the other. Mitt Romney had sewn up the GOP nomination and was flexing his muscle as a fundraiser. He had outfoxed Obama’s campaign a couple of times, pushing Solyndra into the headlines and even getting into David Axelrod’s grill and under his skin at an event in Boston.

Obama could not run on the economy or his signature legislative achievement, ObamaCare. His campaign had built a narrative of the president as an effective commander-in-chief who had killed Osama bin Laden and put al Qaeda on the run. “Osama is dead and GM is alive!” was Vice President Joe Biden’s favorite sentence. Other than the fact of bin Laden’s demise, this was not a national security fact; it was a political narrative aimed at getting Obama re-elected. Al Qaeda had in fact begun to cement a new relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt and had grown in influence in Libya and across the Middle East. Its Libya brand, Ansar al-Sharia, had become a threat in the Benghazi area itself the summer leading up to the attack. Ansar al-Sharia was the author of the attack in Benghazi.

Here is a theory regarding Obama’s, Panetta’s, and Clinton’s actions that night.

Barack Obama comes to the job of the presidency with no command experience at all. His career included years as an adjunct professor and a community organizer before becoming the senator best known for voting “present” in Illinois. He was never a leader when he was in the U.S. Senate. His experience is chiefly as an agitator against command, not in exercising command itself. The largest effort he had ever run had been his own campaign for president, and it’s debatable how much of that he ran and how much was run for him by his lieutenant, David Axelrod.

Just weeks before the election, the Benghazi attack threatened to undo Obama’s carefully crafted al Qaeda campaign narrative. That night, during the attack, President Barack Obama had no idea what to do. He is not a born or trained commander. With lives and American prestige in his hands, he flinched. He stayed true to his character and voted “present.”

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