2013: Hillary Clinton’s View of the Islamic World Was Myopic
The hearings on the Benghazi attack don’t only allow us to render a verdict on Hillary Clinton’s leadership at a time of crisis, but on the administration policy she implemented for a profoundly changing region.
For decades the prevailing belief in Washington has been that despite retrogrades like Saddam or Khamenei, the Middle East would be gradually seduced by modernity and moderation.
The outbreak of the Arab Spring and its spontaneous revolutions were seen not only as the reaction that oppressive and corrupt ruling elites always engender, but as a more hopeful indication of a maturing democratic impulse.
Even when the P.L.O. lost elections in 2006 Washington elites considered it a rejection of the P.L.O.’s corruption, and not an embrace of
Hamas.
Clinton didn't understand that the Arab Spring wasn't modernity in traditional garb, but anti-Americanism with a cloak of modernity.
Yet the Arab Spring, despite its use of modern social networks, was not embracing freedom and modernity, but radical Islam.
The Obama administration, following the guidelines of the president’s Cairo speech in 2009, sought to befriend the new Arab rulers, not understanding the extent to which the rising Islamic sentiment was not modernity dressed in tradition, but radical anti-American sentiment dressed in modernity.
Rather than contradict its narrative of relentless moderation, the administration refused to see that the Benghazi attack symbolized the worst expression of rising anti-American Islamism and instead retreated into another reigning but flawed Washington concept: the West’s humiliation of Muslims must lie at the root of their rage.
Indeed, our acquiescence and outreach to Islamists for most of the last decade was calculated to drain the wellspring of animating Muslim rage against the West. Therefore, the administration argued the attack was a spontaneous protest born of humiliation provoked by an anti-Islam Internet video.
Our misconceptions were resilient and influential. The United States continues to face unabated regional rage.
Secretary Clinton's failure of leadership is only part of the story. What should be on trial is the Obama administration’s – and really the reigning Washington policy elite’s -- misconceived vision of a new Middle East and the sources of rage against us.
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