The Benghazi Hearings We Need [View all]

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The Benghazi Hearings We Need
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Washington Post

What’s tragic about the Benghazi hearings is that they displace the serious inquiries that we desperately need about the direction of our foreign policy.

The United States invaded Iraq more than a decade ago. The assault — with costs including nearly 4,500 U.S. soldiers killed and more than $2 trillion and counting — destabilized the entire region. The Islamic State grew in the ruins. No viable government has been created, and U.S. troops are going back in. We went after Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan over a decade ago. Now Osama bin Laden is dead, but somehow the United States is becoming the guarantor of an Afghanistan government that can’t defend itself despite billions of dollars’ worth of arms and training. Obama now concedes that 5,500 troops or more will be staying on guard.

We joined with allies to topple Moammar Gaddafi in Libya, and now the situation has descended into chaos. We backed the Saudi assault on Yemen and are wrecking havoc there. We announced that Bashar al-Assad must go in Syria, and now are fighting against both the regime and its leading enemy, the Islamic State.

Washington has always featured intense partisan struggles. But it isn’t false nostalgia to remember that in the past, congressional leaders were prepared to put the nation first, at least some of the time. The Watergate Committee witnessed fierce partisan spats, but also bipartisan efforts to find the truth. The Church Committee hearings probed the record of covert actions and excessive domestic spying, producing positive reforms. Sen. J. William Fulbright (D-Ark.), as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in the 1960s, challenged the policies of his fellow Democrat, President Lyndon Johnson, in hearings on U.S. foreign policy and the intervention in Vietnam that helped bring a reassessment of that folly. Rather than pursuing Clinton down an e-mail rabbit hole, a special committee inquiry that focused on what we need to learn from this dismal record of intervention would surely have been more important to the nation.

Yet there is virtually no debate — beyond that of mudslinging — on the failed interventions and permanent empire of bases that burden our foreign policy. This should be a centerpiece of serious congressional inquiry and clarifying presidential campaign debate. Surely it is time to challenge a global overreach that, embraced by both parties, has failed repeatedly in the past and seems doomed to fail in the future.