Iran, Benghazi, And The Age Of Partisan Everything

Republicans wrote the rules, Democrats should play by them.

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Fifteen years ago, Barack Obama helped depose Muammar Gaddafi by illegal means. In March of 2015, he ordered the U.S. military (working with coalition partners) to strike territory within Libya without permission from Congress, and he continued the operation even after the House of Representatives had voted to deny it to him.

Civil war had left Libyan population centers vulnerable to a massacre, and the U.S. was divided, both politically and ideologically, over what to do about it. Republicans in Congress did not conceal well their intent to blame an ethnic cleansing or a wider conflict on Obama. But they were also unwilling to hand him clear authority. They did not want to cast a vote like that anymore than they would have wanted to vote for another bank-bailout. And if, as an ancillary benefit, their intransigence created a no-win proposition for Democrats, so much the better.

So when Obama chose the assertive course of action, he actually had to overrule the legal guidance of his attorney general and other lawyers at the Justice Department.

When militants laid siege to a U.S. outpost in Benghazi a year later, Republicans had a choice: respond in the nature of a loyal opposition, or wave the bloody shirt. They would have been on relatively firm (though still hypocritical) ground dressing Obama down for taking lawless actions that placed Americans in harms way.

But a big election was just weeks away! Rather than do the dry, painstaking work of proper oversight, they created a cinematic universe in which Obama and his advisers left Americans to die in Libya on purpose, in the hope of covering up their own operational failures.

Instead of Benghazi, we got #Benghazi, and it changed the course of American politics.

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Democrats are, unfortunately, not of one mind about the lessons of this recent history.

From one vantage point, Republicans salivated over the deaths of four Americans in a cynical and unbecoming way. They launched a political attack before the bodies were cold. They snorted and freebased their own nonsense so aggressively that Mitt Romney (then the GOP presidential nominee) didn’t even realize he’d leveled a false accusation against Obama at the second presidential debate.

Republicans would go on to lose that election—though not principally because they overplayed their hand in the Benghazi matter. That’s not how they saw it, in any event. After licking their wounds, they didn’t set Benghazi aside and move on to more fruitful issues. They parlayed Benghazi—from a backward looking attack on a term-limited president, into a forward-looking attack on the Democrats’ 2016 frontrunner, Hillary Clinton.

But it was still a clown show—at least from the vantage point of the reality-based world—because Republicans had nothing real to work with. GOP committee chairs would dole out context-free scooplets to credulous journalists, only for their reports to be debunked. Rank and file Republicans grew frustrated with the leadership when House oversight investigations hit dead ends pursuing nonexistent smoking guns. Eventually they tried to consolidate their aimless inquiries into a select committee, but that only fed further disarray. When, in defense of his party’s record, House Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy boasted, “Everybody thought Hillary Clinton was unbeatable, right? But we put together a Benghazi special committee, a select committee. What are her numbers today? Her numbers are dropping,” it was universally understood as a scandalous gaffe.

Clinton famously testified publicly before the select committee for 11 hours and left her GOP interrogators looking like fools.

Through this lens, Benghazi was textbook overreach. A cautionary tale. Many Democrats still understand it that way. Indeed, it’s how they view the GOP’s overheated, insincere, hyperventilating approach to everything.

The problem with that view is that, as messy as #Benghazi was for Republicans, the gambit worked!

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For one thing, McCarthy wasn’t wrong about how Benghazi bled Clinton.

She had spent the better part of two decades shoring up her vulnerabilities with a large population of service members and veterans. Most counterproductively, she supported the Iraq war. Less counterproductively, she was a competent diplomat, and by the time she began her second campaign for the presidency, she was a widely admired figure in both parties. Republicans were able to use Benghazi to rekindle old Clinton hatreds. When Trump accepted the GOP nomination in 2016, most Republicans thought he would lose, but they handed him a potent issue, or at least a ghoulishly demoralizing one. Trump even invited the mother of a U.S. diplomat who’d died in Libya to blame Clinton for her son’s death on the convention’s main stage.

For another, more important thing: Benghazi may not have been a fruitful inquiry for Republicans on its own terms. But it was the means by which they discovered that Clinton used a personal email server for work purposes. On the merits, this discovery should not have doomed her. But in practice it did. There’s no Trump presidency without #Benghazi.

This is why Republicans held Clinton in the mire through years of defeat and infighting. Republicans understood that the future is not written. That one discovery can beget others; that the political implications of things we do not yet know are inherently unpredictable. They run everything like they ran #Benghazi, because they realize embarrassing headlines in beltway news outlets are a small price to pay for covering their opponents in the miasma of scandal.

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Democrats today are at a slight disadvantage relative to the GOP of the Obama years.

When Obama ordered airstrikes in Libya, Republicans already controlled the U.S. House, and they maintained control of it even after Obama defeated Romney.

Today’s Democrats control nothing, and so can not spearhead a full congressional inquiry of Trump’s illegal war against Iran.

But they can resolve to treat it as a scandal, rather than a misjudgment. Nobody asked for this and the administration did not build a case for it. Trump ordered the decapitation of the Iranian regime without a plan for the aftermath. He and his advisers were reportedly unprepared for the scale of the Iranian response.

Multiple service members have already been killed. We lost three F-15 fighters in one day.

This is more than just an unwise use of military power that has cost American lives and will make gasoline more expensive. It's an impeachable offense that Americans have a right to understand from its genesis. How was this decision made as Americans were kept in the dark? Who presented what to whom and what argument if any ultimately persuaded Trump? If records weren’t kept as to this process, what methods are these principals using to conceal their deliberations from the public and the eyes of history? Did Trump administration officials profit from the war by placing bets on Kalshi or Polymarket. Is it the fruit of bribes that Gulf states paid directly to Trump?

We know Trump bears moral responsibility for every life lost, but how many of the lives were lost due to an added layer of command incompetence? How vulnerable are Americans abroad thanks to DOGE and loyalty tests and revenge firings at the FBI?

Asking and demanding answers to these questions is, of course, highly political. That is the world we live in. But it’s one Democrats can only change by winning enough power to re-establish political rules of fair play in America, and one they likely can not change if they refuse, in naive rectitude, to stoop to their opponents’ level. The good news is, exacting a political price for this war does not require Democrats to embellish anything, let alone to foment ugly conspiracy theories. It only requires them not to pull their punches simply because Trump started a war. To show half as much thirst for power as the fascists they’ve been called upon by history to defeat.