[LINK] "9/11/12 in Libya and Egypt"

[rfmcdonald]

bradhicks has an excellent background post describing the actual factors triggering attacks on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.

The stories out of Libya and Egypt broke just as I was going to bed. (I sleep at weird hours in my old age.) When I woke up, and skimmed a half-dozen news sites to see what had changed and started to write something up, only to find out that Richard Engel was going to be on Rachel Maddow's show, so I sat down and shut up and waited politely, because what Richard Engel doesn't know about the current politics of the Middle East, and the players, I could calligraph onto my thumbnail with a Speedball C-3 point. I would, frankly, think more highly of any politician if, anytime something surprising happened in the middle east, when he was asked about it, said, "I don't know, yet, I'm waiting to hear from Richard Engel." It turns out he didn't have a lot more to say than was on the other sites, but Maddow's intro story had the pieces I was missing.

What happened yesterday breaks down into four very distinct stories, and don't trust anybody who tries to lump them together: (1) the military-style assault on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya, that killed our ambassador to Libya and burned down the consulate; (2) the completely unrelated mob protest on the US embassy in Cairo that was, almost inexplicably, allowed to enter and vandalize the compound; (3) the covert-ops media provocation that was behind the Cairo riot; and (4) the story of how one American political campaign tried to politicize this before knowing any of the facts and shot their foot off. I'm not going to say anything further about story #4; it's beneath my contempt and will, frankly, no longer matter when people's attention drifts away from in it the next couple of days. But those first three stories have fascinating back story, and/or fascinating recent reporting, that you may want to know while your co-workers and friends are blathering about them.

[. . .]

It doesn't make any sense to talk about what just happened, either in Libya or in Egypt, without catching you up on what's been happening in each of those countries since their previous military dictatorships were toppled, a year and a half ago, in the Arab Spring. Both countries are having the same problem that every post-revolutionary government has in its first couple of years: until the victorious side (and, to some extent, the supporters of the vanquished out-going government, and to even larger extent the vast majority who don't care as long as they have a job and can afford to pay their bills and there's some semblance of policing and sanitation) agree on what constitutes a legitimate post-dictatorship government, there are a lot of heavily armed groups running around, confident that they can overthrow the next government if they don't like it any better, who remain to be convinced that they won't need to.

Read this vital commentary.