Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi (8 page)

Hana Said, fifty-five, will never forget the last conversation she had with her twenty-seven-year-old son, who had gone down to Baghdad to see relatives. She was at home in Karakosh, capital of the predominantly Christian Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq, when he called her in hushed tones on his cell phone. He was huddled in a side chapel behind a steel door in Our Lady of Salvation Catholic Church in Baghdad on October 31, 2010, waiting for Muslim terrorists to murder him.

“Ayoub was telling us what was going on, minute by minute,” she told me. “He had been wounded and was begging us to get someone to open the outside door to the chapel to rescue them.”

For several hours, Hana says, she kept calling her son’s cell phone every few minutes while her husband tried to reach the authorities to tell them about the people trapped in the side chapel. Then, finally, at around seven-thirty that evening, Ayoub stopped answering. The police told Hana later that the terrorists had lobbed a hand grenade over the door into the side chapel, killing her son and the other two people who had taken refuge with him. In all, fifty-eight worshippers died while attending church that day, and another ninety-eight were wounded.
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President Obama had already begun his promised disengagement from Iraq, and relied increasingly on Prime Minister Nouri al-Malaki and his security forces to fill the vacuum. And yet, many of the people I spoke to in Iraq about this incident believe al-Malaki’s own security forces were complicit with the attackers. For starters, the Iraqi Special Forces assault team that eventually stormed the church could have opened the outside door to the side chapel where Ayoub and his companions were hiding. Instead, they burst in through the front doors of the church and shot everybody in sight, including wounded worshippers.

Then there were the elaborate preparations for the attack itself. For several days, the Interior Ministry troops guarding the church surreptitiously moved the Jersey barriers closer to the church, so that the terrorists could drive right up to the front doors. The SUVs they used in the attack had dark-tinted windows and no license plates, the kind of vehicle available only to officials with high-level security clearance. This allowed them to get through checkpoints without being stopped, even though they were carrying assault weapons and explosives.

In responding to the attack, the White House press office issued a generic statement condemning a “senseless act of hostage taking and violence by terrorists linked to al-Qaida in Iraq,” but failed to mention that the victims were Christians or that they had been attending church. In response to the bloodiest single attack on an Iraqi Christian church ever, President Obama kept silent. The blood of a single Muslim could work him into a rant, but the blood of Christians apparently left him cold.

Attacks on Christians were accelerating all across the Muslim world, yet the Obama White House took two years to fill the vacant position of ambassador-at-large for religious freedom. For Nina Shea, a member of the U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom and a Hudson Institute fellow, “The goal of the extremists is to drive Christians from Iraq. It is religious cleansing.” The attacks had spread to Egypt, where Coptic Christians were being prosecuted “for praying inside their own homes without a permit,” according to Dina Guirguis, a research fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

In Congress, members of a bipartisan human rights panel named after the late Representative Tom Lantos, the only Holocaust survivor to serve in Congress, urged the administration to put pressure on the governments of Iraq and Egypt to protect religious minorities. “Going to the market and riding the bus, Iraqi Christians face death every day. There is no question that Christians are being targeted,” said Representative Anna Eshoo (D-CA), the granddaughter of Assyrian Christians who fled the genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks at the end of World War I. But the Obama White House ignored Congress, while giving preferential treatment to Iraqi Muslims seeking to immigrate to the United States. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians desperately waited in line for visas at United Nations offices in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria, where they had fled for their lives from their
jihadi
Muslim assailants.
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When the Patriarch of the Maronite (Catholic) Church in Lebanon, Bechara Rahi, sought an audience with President Obama to warn about the ongoing persecution of Christians in the Levant, his request was rejected by Obama’s religious affairs advisor, Dalia Mogahed, a prominent Muslim activist. But if you were a member or sympathizer of the Muslim Brotherhood, the White House rolled out the red carpet at Iftar dinners and private receptions, even if you had ties to known terrorist organizations. It was open season on Christians all across the Muslim world.
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Soon, it would also be open season on Americans as well.

THE STREET VENDOR

Act II of Obama’s new policy toward the Muslim world began with a slap in the face and two trays of confiscated fruit.

Mohamed Bouazizi was a twenty-six-year-old street vendor in the sleepy town of Sidi Bouzid on the edge of the Tunisian desert. Since dropping out of school as a teenager, he eked out a modest living for himself and his family by selling fruits and vegetables from a cart in the local market. In a good month, he made around one hundred fifty dollars to support his mother, her incapacitated second husband, and six siblings.

Like many other street vendors, “Basboosa,” as locals knew him, never had enough money to buy a proper license from the authorities, so he regularly ran afoul of the police, who would harass him on a whim. Sometimes, they would demand a small cash bribe to leave him alone. On other occasions, they would take a tray of fruit. Whenever he saw them coming, he knew he was about to lose his profit for the day, and sometimes for the week. The police were corrupt and everyone knew it, but no one did anything about it.

On December 17, 2010, Bouazizi set off to the market at 8 AM, as was his habit, with the cartload of produce he had purchased from the wholesalers the night before. His mother remembers that he was happy. The trouble began at 10:30 AM, when a female municipal official started her song and dance about him lacking a permit. It was still early in the day, and he didn’t have enough to pay her the money she was demanding. And besides, he had had enough. He started shouting, complaining of the constant shakedowns. That was enough to provoke the forty-five-year-old official, Faida Hamdi, to slap him in the face and spit on him. According to some reports, she reached into his cart and took two trays of apples and ostentatiously put them in her nearby car. According to eyewitnesses, she ordered policemen with her to turn over Bouazizi’s cart, scattering and kicking his produce on the ground. She confiscated his electronic scales, and told him he could get them back by showing up at the local governor’s office to pay his fine. She later denied she had ever asked him for a bribe or roughed him up.

Angered and humiliated by the confrontation, he ran to the governor’s office to ask for his scales back, but the local officials refused to see him. Later, people remembered hearing him shout to the guards, “If you won’t see me, I’ll burn myself.”

And that’s what he did. Going to a nearby gas station, he purchased a can of gas, ran back to the governor’s office, and set himself on fire in the middle of the crowded street. “How do you expect me to make a living?” he shouted, as the flames licked at his clothes. Cars started honking and a crowd gathered in shock. Someone tried to pour water on him, but that only made it worse. By the time an ambulance arrived, he was nearly dead.

Organized protests against the way the local officials and the police had treated Mohamed Bouazizi began the next day and ripped through decades of resentment and suppressed rage like a wildfire. Within twenty-four hours, they transformed dusty Sidi Bouzid into the focal point of the Arab and international media. Soon, the protests spread to the capital, Tunis, and focused not on reform, but on an end to the regime of president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Within days, anti-government protests also erupted in Algeria. Within less than a month, President Ben Ali fled the country for exile in Saudi Arabia. Thus began the events now known as the Arab Spring, in a dusty oasis town in the dead of winter, born out of the humiliation of a street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi.

The Obama White House and the State Department were slow to sense the winds of change. Top on the agenda that Christmas season was the repeal of the Pentagon’s “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on gays in the military, the controversial new START treaty then in the Senate, and administration efforts to prevent a repeat of the al Qaeda underwear bomber of 2009, who nearly succeeded in blowing up a U.S. passenger jet en route to Detroit on Christmas Day.

On New Year’s Eve, two Muslim men set off a car bomb at a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria, Egypt, killing twenty-three parishioners and wounding ninety-six more during midnight mass. This time, President Obama had the White House press office issue a statement in his name, saying he deplored the casualties “from both the Christian and Muslim communities,” even though only Christians were targeted. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, by contrast, understood the jihadi nature of the attack, and warned of “a particularly perverse program of cleansing in the Middle East, religious cleansing.”

The very first mention of the momentous events in Tunisia by the administration was this exchange between an unnamed reporter and State Department spokesman P. J. Crowley during his daily briefing on January 4, 2011, after nearly three weeks of daily protests including the shooting deaths of several protesters.

QUESTION:
On Tunisia, there’s continued, sort of, civil unrest there, and I was just wondering—

MR. CROWLEY:
What country?

QUESTION:
Tunisia. Tunisia. And I was wondering what you made of the situation there.

MR. CROWLEY:
Actually, I didn’t get updated on Tunisia today. So we’ll save that question—

QUESTION:
When was the last time you did get updated on Tunisia? (Laughter.)

QUESTION:
How about next on Libya?
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And so it went, with the Washington press corps yucking it up with the officials they were responsible for covering as if together they were the only forces who made history. At the White House, it was total chaos. By January 13, 2011—the day before Ben Ali fled—White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had yet to mention Tunisia. As reports came over the wires the next day of Ben Ali’s departure, a lone reporter asked Gibbs for comment. He deferred the question to Tom Donilon, Obama’s recently appointed national security advisor.

MR. DONILON:
[O]n Tunisia, I was told literally as I was walking in, that President Ben Ali—it’s been reported, at least—is leaving the . . .

MR. VIETOR:
We’ve not confirmed that.

MR. DONILON:
Have not confirmed that—okay. We’ve seen obviously the state media reporting that the president has dismissed the government and has called for legislative elections, and we’re monitoring these developments, Jake. Obviously, in this case we would condemn the ongoing violence in Tunisia, call upon the Tunisian authorities to fulfill the important commitments made by President Ben Ali in his speech yesterday to the Tunisian people, including respect for basic human rights in a process of much needed political reform. . . .
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When the demonstrations moved to Egypt on January 25, 2011, the administration shifted gears, stung by allegations that they were asleep at the switch as momentous events were taking place in a critical part of the world, or simply incompetent when it came to defending America’s interests. Obama was determined his administration would not repeat its pathetic performance in Tunisia. He sent former U.S. ambassador Frank Wisner, a close confidant of President Hosni Mubarak, to Cairo, with orders that the Egyptian president should step down or watch as the United States cut aid to his regime and forced him out. Seeing that his American ally had deserted him, just as Jimmy Carter had deserted the Shah of Iran before him, Mubarak caved in to the inevitable and turned over power to subordinates just three weeks later.

This apparent U.S. success in negotiating Mubarak’s departure before a massive bloodbath had occurred led Obama strategist David Axelrod to boast that the White House had been “out in front” of the Arab Spring well before the protests had even begun. In fact, to listen to Axelrod, the removal of long-standing U.S. allies—now termed
dictators
by the White House and senior administration officials—was U.S. policy.

“The way [Obama has] confronted it, is he went to Cairo [in June 2009] and talked about the need, the universal human rights of people. He’s on several occasions directly confronted President Mubarak on it. And pushed him on the need for political reform in his country,” Axelrod told ABC’s Jake Tapper Friday, on the advisor’s last day of work at the White House.

“To get ahead of this?” Tapper asked.

“Exactly. To get ahead of this. This is a project he’s been working on for two years, and today the president is working hard to encourage restraint and a cessation of violence against the people of Egypt,” said Axelrod.

“Nice myth,” said one human-rights advocate Tapper asked about Axelrod’s description.
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But, in a way, Axelrod was right and was revealing the secret goal behind the seemingly chaotic response of the Obama administration to the fast pace of events in the Middle East. Rather than empower the forces of democratic change sought by the human-rights advocates and liberal democrats in those countries, the policies of President Obama and his administration enhanced the standing of the Muslim Brotherhood, which by then was just barely hiding its head in the shadows.

This apparent turnaround in U.S. policy caught establishment commentators by surprise. When White House spokesman Gibbs announced that the post-Mubarak government must “include a whole host of important non-secular actors,” the
Washington Post
explained that the United States was “rapidly reassessing its tenuous relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood.”
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Of course, that was simply not true. Since Obama’s secret meeting at the White House with Brotherhood leaders in April 2009 and his invitation to them to join him during his Cairo speech two months later, Obama’s mind was made up: He preferred political Islam over secular regimes in the Middle East. “After all, Brotherhood operatives are in the American government and working closely with it, thanks to Barack Obama,” wrote Robert Spencer. “Why shouldn’t the same situation prevail in Egypt?”
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