Yes, you heard me. Me who wrote the words Obama Don't Hire Hillary. The one who knows she missed a perfect opportunity with the Quadrennial Diplomatic and Development Review (QDDR) to restructure the DD dinosaur into a lean mean diplodevelopment machine. You heard it here, the former Secretary of State, Hillary Rodham Clinton was right. Like she said, "what does it matter?"
Before we all get carried away here saying she doesn't care about the people who -- rest their souls -- brutally lost their lives in Benghazi, Libya that day, let's get our heads out of the political propaganda and think about what she actually meant.
Frankly, it doesn't matter that an administration member said demonstration, while the President himself came out the very next day saying terrorism. You say tomato.
What does matter is that the Congress is wasting our time and money rehashing rhetoric instead of reason. It does matter that you can't take money out of box A to put in box B and protect our diplomats, which Clinton reminded the Congress of time and again (we are not replaying that though). And it does matter that we are constantly looking to war to make peace. Do not forget the good ole US of A played a large part in overthrowing Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi. Like him or not, he really wasn't the U.S.'s leader to overthrow.
Nevertheless, Congress is worried about our government misleading us through a bad decision to put Ambassador Susan Rice on TV with half the story. However, they seem to forget that only 10 short years ago American intelligence was rewritten to chase after a "mushroom cloud" that never even existed. Can you say 'misleading'?
Over 5,000 dead, 20,000 wounded, countless deployments, suicides in the Army at an all time high, post traumatic stress, families broken, countless Iraqis dead and still suffering and over a trillion spent, whew, and the U.S. Congress is still talking about whether the Administration said it was a movie that sparked a demonstration that caused this atrocity or it was terrorism. Like one of us commoners out here can't figure out it was the latter.
Oh Senator McCain, we the masses are just not smart enough to see the light.
We the masses are getting pretty tired of you the Congress wasting time when there are real problems out there that must be fixed. If you'd like to start with the Benghazi issue, well then, why not.
Let's look at the state of our diplomatic and development foreign policy tools. The U.S. is so busy using its military might to promote peace that it has forgotten that the 2D duo needs the same care and support as well.
If Congress were at all serious, it would take this opportunity to take a hard look at the State Department and its U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) sister and see to it that they improve processes primarily so this never happens again.
Secondarily, each of these agencies needs to be valued as a compliment to our military not a hindrance to our future. It's time they went through a real bureaucratic review, trim the fat, improve recruitment and embrace a readiness program, much like their military counterparts, so we don't ever again send our diplomats unprepared for the environment that awaits them.
There is much more to be done in these 2Ds that I will not go into here. The bottom line however is that we must pay attention to more than military might. The U.S. needs to refocus and rethink this idea of using war to get peace when it is so much less destructive to use so good old-fashioned diplomacy and relationship building to get the that peace instead of continually fueling the cycle of war.