Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

Government shutdown puts U.S. security at risk

IF HOUSE Republicans have had an obsession to rival their hatred of the Affordable Care Act, it has been their determination to find a scandal in the 2012 attack on a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, in which Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was killed.

Yet this week those same Republicans are putting U.S. embassies across the world at risk with their shutdown of the U.S. government. More broadly, they are endangering national security at a time when the United States remains under threat from al-Qaeda and affiliated groups.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the intelligence committee, said on the floor of the Senate on Tuesday that 72 percent of the civilian intelligence agency workforce has been furloughed.


“This means that, with the exception of a few intelligence agencies that have a significant number of military personnel, the lights are being turned off and the majority of the people who produce our intelligence, analyze that intelligence and provide warning of terrorist attacks or advise policymakers of major national security events will be prevented from doing their jobs,” she said. “We have ambassadors in threatened capitals . . . [who] rely on their intelligence briefers and the tactical intelligence support to their security teams as much as they rely on the Marines who guard front gates. . . . What we are doing now puts American lives at risk.”

Ten years after it began, the Iraq war still haunts the United States in the nearly 4,500 troops who died there; the more than 30,000 American wounded who have come home; the more than $2 trillion spent on combat operations and reconstruction, which inflated the deficit; and in the lessons learned about the limits of American leadership and power.

Yet none of the Bush administration’s war architects have been called to account for their mistakes, and even now, many are invited to speak on policy issues as if they were not responsible for one of the worst strategic blunders in American foreign policy. In a video posted recently by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, Mr. Wolfowitz said he still believed the war was the right thing to do. Will he and his partners ever have the humility to admit that it was wrong to prosecute this war?