The Cavalry That Never Came by Mark Steyn • May 9, 2014 at 7:24 am https://www.steynonline.com/6325/the-cavalry-that-never-came A week before the 2012 election, I wrote: Someone at the highest level of the United States government made the decision to abandon American consular staff to their fate and cede U.S. sovereign territory to an al-Qaeda assault team — and four out of five Sunday news shows don't think it's worth talking about. In the smoking ruins of that consulate in Benghazi, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods fought for hours and killed 60 of the enemy before they were overwhelmed, waiting for the cavalry that never came. They're still waiting – for Candy Crowley, David Gregory, Bob Schieffer, and George Stephanopoulos to do their job. Democrats and their media enablers openly giggle at the word "Benghazi" now. So funny, isn't it? Those provincial simpletons at Fox News are still droning on about dead Americans in Benghazi as if anybody but their drooling rubes care about it, ha-ha... If the Democrats are right about that, it doesn't speak well for the American people. Those four Americans died serving the United States - not Obama, not Clinton, but their fellow Americans. And they're owed not the mawkish, hollow, self-serving eulogies written by hack staffers for the President and the Secretary of State to read over the coffins, but the truth about how and why they died. It's odd, even for the insular Obama cultists, that so many people find that a laughing matter. Yesterday, Hugh Hewitt devoted most of his three hours on air to Benghazi. I put the night in context: MARK STEYN: Not a lot of U.S. ambassadors get killed in the line of duty. HUGH HEWITT: Right. MS: If you discount the poor fellow who was on the plane with General Zia in Pakistan when that mysteriously blew up in mid-flight, you have to go back to Kabul over 30 years ago for the killing of a U.S. ambassador. So it happens extremely rarely. Within half-an-hour, the President knew what was happening and why it was happening. Yet he did not act. Why? For me, that question remains as important as it was a year and a half ago: MS: Brave men fought valiantly all through that horrible, long night, and saved dozens of people. But they were waiting for the help that never came, the help that was two hours away but was never ordered. And the official explanation is that 'Oh, well, we could have sent somebody, but they wouldn't have got there in time." Well, you know, just to go back to your sporting analogies, a terrorist attack on a U.S. facility is not a cricket match or a soccer match... You don't know how long it's going to last till the attack ends... Even if they had sent forces and they hadn't gotten there in time to save the ambassador or to save the other three people who died, they could have got there in time when the people who committed this act were still sifting through the rubble of the U.S. facility. And so they would have caught them, instead of these guys being free to wander around, swank around the Maghreb boasting about what they were able to pull off. So who took the decision not to act, and why? MS: Was it just about electoral advantage? Was it just to protect Joe Biden's soundbite ...al Qaeda is dead and General Motors is alive? Or is it actually worse than that? In other words, in those first few moments, when the President is informed what's going on, does somebody, does somebody take the decision that because this whole thing is unhelpful to their view of the world, they are not going to send force? Because that, to me, does render whoever made that decision ...unfit for office. As I go on to say, Chris Stevens was one of them, a Team Obama loyalist. But they abandoned him and dishonored him in death because the President's political needs outweighed his life. The heartlessness of all these caring, compassionate Democrats would impress Putin - if it was ever applied to America's enemies. You can read the entire transcript here. © 2020 Mark Steyn Enterprises (US) Inc. All rights reserved.

No part of this website or any of its contents may be reproduced, copied, modified or adapted, without the prior written consent of Mark Steyn Enterprises. If you're a member of The Mark Steyn Club and you take issue with this article, then have at it in our comments section. receive the latest by email: subscribe to steynonline's free weekly mailing list en