You are likely right and what you said about Obama is logical, but I think many of our bureaucracies are just as powerful as the elected President now and they shared the worldview of Obama.
How many lives have been lost since the “Arab Spring”? Is the Middle East safer and more stable today? Are there Stinger missiles in the wrong hands and where is the congressional oversight?
I can believe that Chris Stevens was there to “clean up a mess” but what they allowed to happen still makes no logical sense to me. Stevens was “one of them” so why hang him and the other personnel at the annex out to dry like that?
It was their employees so the assumption would be that they were involved in whatever the “real mission” was so I don’t think it was deliberate. The simplest explanation is that they were just that incompetent.
You had the CIA, State Department, DoD, and National Command Authority and each failed in some respect although DoD had nothing to do with it and reportedly did not know what was going on in Benghazi. They were ready to respond and could have prevented the last half of it, but nobody would wake up Hillary or Obama to get permission.
Right, that mindset is probably pretty common in that crowd but I suspect Obama was especially passionate about it and gave it extra push.
Regarding Stevens, my guess is that he and his staff were sacrificed to keep Benghazi from blowing up into an even bigger incident. The article makes an interesting point, which is can you imagine how bad it would have looked if helicopters had been dispatched and one was shot down with a Stinger missile?