It was probably inadvertent on NYT's Kirkpatrick's part, but he exposed the MEC's Middle East policy for the delusion that it is

Great Caroline Glick column at Townhall today on how, while the MSM has focused on the revival of the it-was-the-video meme, the real takeaway from the Kirkpatrick piece about the Benghazi attack was the exposure of the appeasement at the core of MEC-ism.

Obama’s first assertion is that radical Islam is not inherently hostile to the US. As a consequence, America can appease radical Islamists. Moreover, once radical Muslims are appeased, they will become US allies, (replacing the allies the US abandons to appease the radical Muslims).

Obama’s second strategic guidepost is his claim that the only Islamic group that is a bona fide terrorist organization is the faction of al-Qaida directly subordinate to Osama bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Only this group cannot be appeased and must be destroyed through force.

The administration has dubbed the Zawahiri faction of al-Qaida “core al-Qaida.” And anyone who operates in the name of al-Qaida, or any other group that does not have courtroom-certified operational links to Zawahiri, is not really al-Qaida, and therefore, not really a terrorist group or a US enemy.

These foundations have led the US to negotiate with the Taliban in Afghanistan. They are the rationale for the US’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide. They are the basis for Obama’s allegiance to Turkey’s Islamist government, and his early support for the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition.

They are the basis for the administration’s kneejerk support for the PLO against Israel.

Obama’s insistent bid to appease Iran, and so enable the mullocracy to complete its nuclear weapons program. is similarly a product of his strategic assumptions. So, too, the US’s current diplomatic engagement of Hezbollah in Lebanon owes to the administration’s conviction that any terror group not directly connected to Zawahiri is a potential US ally.

From the outset of the 2011 revolt against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, it was clear that a significant part of the opposition was composed of jihadists aligned if not affiliated with al-Qaida.  Benghazi was specifically identified by documents seized by US forces in Iraq as a hotbed of al-Qaida recruitment.

Obama and his advisers dismissed and ignored the evidence. The core of al-Qaida, they claimed, was not involved in the anti-Gaddafi revolt. And to the extent jihadists were fighting Gaddafi, they were doing so as allies of the US.

Kirkpatrick's reportage documents the zeal of Libyan youth for getting involved with juhad:

One US-supported Islamist militia commander recalled to him that at the outset of the anti-Gaddafi rebellion, “Teenagers came running around… [asking] ‘Sheikh, sheikh, did you know al-Qaida? Did you know Osama bin Laden? How do we fight?”

She points out the bitter irony of the fact that Chris Stevens's signing on to this core tenet of MEC-ism wound up getting him killed:

Ambassador Stevens, who had served as the administration’s emissary to the rebels during the insurrection against Gaddafi, knew personally many of the terrorists who orchestrated the attack. And until the very end, he was taken in by the administration’s core belief that it was possible to appease al-Qaida-sympathizing Islamic jihadists who were not directly affiliated with Zawahiri.

As Kirkpatrick noted, Stevens “helped shape the Obama administration’s conviction that it could work with the rebels, even those previously hostile to the West, to build a friendly, democratic government.” 

Which is not to say that Kirkpatrick wasn't glaringly wrong about a key element of his assertion.  He was, and that's because he is motivated by a desire to make MEC-ism look like a valid policy and, by inference, stick it to the foreign-policy school that says jihad in general is a mortal danger to the West:

Kirkpatrick’s claim that al-Qaida played no role in the attack was refuted by theTimes’ own reporting six weeks after the attack. It has also been refuted by congressional and State Department investigations, by the UN and by a raft of other reporting.

His claim that the YouTube video did spur some of the attackers to action was categorically rejected last spring in sworn congressional testimony by then-deputy chief of the US mission to Libya Gregory Hicks.

Last May Hicks stated, “The YouTube video was a non-event in Libya. The video was not instigative of anything that was going on in Libya. We saw no demonstrators related to the video anywhere in Libya.”

Kirkpatrick’s larger message – that the reasoning behind Obama’s entire counterterrorist strategy and his overall Middle East policy is totally wrong, and deeply destructive – has been missed because his article was written and published to whitewash the administration’s deliberate mischaracterization of the events in Benghazi, not to discredit the rationale behind its Middle East policy and counterterrorism strategy. This is why he claimed that al-Qaida wasn’t involved in the attack. And this is why he claimed that the YouTube video was a cause for the attack.

By so narrowly defining the threat, the MEC, who may be an ideologue but who is also rather lazy, let himself off the hook for any real heavy lifting that actually protects the nation he presides over.