The last time I can think of troops being deployed to protect an embassy was in another country experiencing civil war after their long time dictator was overthrown….well, it didn’t end too well...
Troops were protecting the (diplomatic mission, not an embassy) in Benghazi? I agree though, I'm sure zero security presence would have definitely prevented the attacks.
Smart take.
I was under the impression that the mission in Benghazi was our embassy as we had yet to establish a functioning one in Tripoli. And I'm not making a point about Benghazi as much as a point that sending troops to Baghdad is an invitation for ISIS to try and create a Benghazi like attack on our embassy, which is bigger than the Vatican and contains the former Republican Palace.
We should be completely evacuating our embassy, not reinforcing it.
We need a Saddam Hussein Blingee to complement the Milosevic one for every smug apologist for tyrants who revel in any level of violence and carnage provided they can use it to prove a fuzzy political point. There's a disturbing trend where people fetishise murderous dictators based on some hyper-bourgeois notion of "stability".
Saddam Hussein killed a bunch of Iraqis. Now Islamist terrorists are killing a bunch of Iraqis.
We spent billions of dollars to remove Saddam Hussein from power so that Iraqis could be tortured and killed by someone other than Saddam Hussein.
We weren't "welcomed as liberators." There is no latent liberal democratic tendency in the Iraqi people that just needed to be awakened by some 'Murican nation building. The only choices in the Middle East are who you'd rather be oppressed by.
Iraq under Saddam Hussein didn't have roadside bombs blowing up indiscriminately. It didn't have radical mullahs forcing women into hijab. The lights were on and the water was running. If you pissed off Saddam, you got tortured and killed.
This is the alternative: bombs blowing up indiscriminately, Sharia law, and a total breakdown in public services. And if you piss off Maliki/ISIS/etc, you get tortured and killed by Maliki/ISIS/etc.
If you seriously think the latter is somehow preferable to the former and that we were right to spend our own blood and treasure to bring that about, then you are, with all due respect, an idiot and a naif.
It would also likely have contained Iran a bit more. Now they have free reign in the region.
