Okay, short of “Iran and Israel just launched 1,000 rockets at each other,” or “Europe’s stock market just wiped out to 1% and the NYSE is not opening,” in normal diplomatic life, a missing ambassador in Al Queda territory is one of the very biggest imaginable.
Obama went to bed with a missing ambassador, who might have been on youtube in a few hours pleading for his life, or admitting to shipping SA-22 manpads to the Syrian AQ groups. Or he could have gotten the Danny Pearl/Nick Berg intro to jihad 101.
Never mind the 3 dead pawns. The king and queen on this board, in this context, is the ambassador. A missing ambassador, in the hands of AQ, is 1,000 times worse than an ambassador who is a known KIA.
And this POTUS of ours went to bed, and left a “no border crossing rescue” set of standing orders.
Some good men are dead,
because Obama went to bed.
IMO there would be a lot more to an attack on an ambassador and an embassy. (or any of its properties) An attack on an ambassador, any ambassador, has more significant implications than, say, an attack on a mil base somewhere. An attack on any diplomatic mission property has big implications being American soil. The message such attacks send have enormous national security and foreign relations ramifications.
How we respond (or utterly fail to respond) sends a message back about what the U.S. is made of and how we will respond to other provocations anywhere in the world. The message sent or unsent is a ripple that travels around the globe changing the view of the U.S. everywhere. 0coward has just told the world that he can't be trusted by his closest allies, his own ambassadors. They have to see him as utterly spineless now. And proven so in the open not just backroom opinions.
The point I am driving at here is meant for all the couch potatoes out there who might still doubt that the POTUS had to be notified immediately and had to be involved first hand in every decision and had to be the one to sign off on any and all actions approved or denied for reasons that exceed even the undeniable need for POTUS to sign off on crossing and acting on foreign soil.
The downside of getting it wrong is bigger than merely violating sovereign foreign soil.