With regard to critics of the Obama administration for not doing more to respond to the attack on our consulate in Benghazi, former Secretary of Defense Bob Gates had the following to say. This much sums up my views perfectly.
“It’s sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces…The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm’s way, and there just wasn’t time to do that.”
“Frankly, had I been in the job at the time, I think my decisions would have been just as theirs were.”
“We don’t have a ready force standing by in the Middle East, and so getting somebody there in a timely way would have been very difficult, if not impossible.”
“I would not have approved sending an aircraft, a single aircraft, over Benghazi under those circumstances.”
“To send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous.”
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