McGurn: The Fog of Obama's Non-War - Wall Street Journal

Mitt Romney had it only half right when he attempted in the second presidential debate to score Barack Obama for his reluctance to concede that Benghazi was a terrorist attack. The real issue is not how long the president took to call the assault on the U.S. consulate an "act of terror"—but that he still has not called it an act of war.

Plainly this is no oversight. On "The Late Show with David Letterman" a week after the attack—late-night television having become our commander in chief's preferred venue for addressing the great public issues—Mr. Letterman asked President Obama directly whether the Benghazi attack was an act of war, one that meant we were at war. Mr. Obama said "no"—and went on to say that terrorists had attacked not only the Benghazi compound but a "variety of our embassies."

There was a reason for that addendum, and, as odd as it may seem, a logic. As anyone who has been part of a White House communications team knows, words are chosen (and un-chosen) for a reason. In President Obama's case, calling a textbook act of war by its rightful name would undermine a foreign policy based on a single idea: He's the man who gets us out of wars, not into them.

Associated Press

An empty bullet casing lies on the ground near one of the burned cars at the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi.

Scour the president's speeches and you will find that war is either something he has ended (Iraq), is ending responsibly (Afghanistan), or is helping us to "turn the page on." In like manner, Mr. Obama suggests that war is something from the George W. Bush era, telling crowds that a vote for Mr. Romney means going "back to a foreign policy that takes us into wars with no plan to get out." As for the president's surrogates who are now on television trying to answer embarrassing questions about why the help that Americans pleaded for in Benghazi never came, the solitary reference to war has been to the "fog of war."

The point is that for all the administration's complaints about opponents "politicizing" Benghazi (this from a White House that leaked politically helpful but nonetheless sensitive details about the raid on bin Laden), the logic of the president's response to Benghazi has been political from the start. Libya was supposed to be the Obama success story, showing how this president achieves our goals abroad without committing American troops or treasure. However ridiculous it might have been to blame the whole thing on a YouTube video, politically the tactic was far preferable to admitting that the president who boasts about getting us out of war in Iraq and Afghanistan might have a whole new one brewing in Libya.

Now those political choices are coming back to bite him. Sooner or later (though perhaps not in time to affect the election), the conflicting stories about Benghazi that we are now hearing from key players will bring down the president's political narrative.

Start with the Central Intelligence Agency, whose spokesman declared in an Oct. 26 statement that "no one at any level in the CIA told anybody not to help those in need." In Beltwayspeak this means: The buck stopped somewhere between the Pentagon and the White House.

At the Pentagon, meanwhile, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says that because there was not enough real-time information available about the attack, "Gen. [Carter] Ham, and Gen. [Martin] Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we could not put forces at risk in that situation." Mr. Panetta's problem is that a Utah congressman who visited Libya is saying that Gen. Ham told him that forces were in place to move but he never got the order. Adding to the intrigue was the announcement earlier this month that Gen. Ham will be replaced as head of the U.S. Africa Command. On Monday, Gen. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said that Gen. Ham's reassignment from the Africa command was not because of Libya.

As for President Obama, just as he told Russia's leaders that he would have more "flexibility" about missile defense after the election, he now tells the American people that he will be freer to speak about Benghazi after Nov. 6, when the results of the investigation are (conveniently) scheduled to be delivered. So long as the only questioners Mr. Obama faced before the election were late-night comics and the incurious national press corps, that might have been the end of it.

Last Friday, however, KUSA-TV reporter Kyle Clark in Denver put it to the president simply and directly in a satellite interview: "Were the Americans under attack at the consulate in Benghazi, Libya, denied requests for help during that attack? And is it fair to tell Americans that what happened is under investigation and we'll all find out after the election?" Mr. Obama replied, but he didn't answer the questions.

In light of Benghazi, it's interesting to go back to 2004 and then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the 9/11 Commission about the greatest failure of Republican and Democratic administrations before that fateful day. "The terrorists were at war with us," she said, "but we were not yet at war with them."

Eleven years after 9/11 and seven weeks after the murder of his ambassador in Benghazi on the 9/11 anniversary, President Obama has yet to heed the lesson.

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