DAVE WEIGEL thinks Mitt Romney muffed a big chance in the most talked-about exchange in yesterday's debate, when a questioner asked Barack Obama why there hadn't been a response to requests by the Benghazi consulate for heavier security in the days before it was attacked. But Dave Weigel is wrong: there was no big chance to muff. The reason Mr Romney couldn't make hay out of the Benghazi argument is that the argument is a confused mess. The people who are making it don't understand what point they're trying to make, so it's not surprising that audiences don't tend to understand it either.

As Mr Weigel says, Mr Obama's initial response to the question was the stock answer he's been giving for weeks: the United States is investigating the attack and will identify the perpetrators and hunt them down. But he thinks Mr Romney then blew an opportunity to do what Republicans have been trying to do for weeks, ie, turn the attacks into Mr Obama's version of Jimmy Carter's Iranian hostage crisis.

Romney rose and ambled slowly toward an answer. “I—I think the president just said correctly that—that the buck does stop at his desk,” he said, “and—and he takes responsibility for—for that—for that—the failure in providing those security resources, and those terrible things may well happen from time to time.” He didn’t point out, as he could have, that the commander-in-chief had just dodged Ladka’s question. He said that Obama’s decision to proceed with a Sept. 12 fundraiser had “symbolic significance, and perhaps even material significance.” Obama was ready for this, too. “The day after the attack, Governor, I stood in the Rose Garden, and I told the American people and the world that we are going to find out exactly what happened, that this was an act of terror.”

Mr Romney then prepared to claim that Mr Obama hadn't called the attack an act of terror; Mr Obama dryly fended off Mr Romney's claim, and moderator Candy Crowley shut Mr Romney down by stating that Mr Obama had in fact referred to them as acts of terror. Point to Mr Obama. Mr Weigel chides Mr Romney for failing to connect the question to the overarching Republican narrative: the "cannonades of questions and documents and witnesses and punditry and timelines [that have] formed into a glowing radioactive gruel, 'Benghazi-gate,' in which the administration was simply hapless and ignorant and unable to say that terrorism exists."

I think that by the time you get to the end of Mr Weigel's sentence here, you should realise that the problem isn't so much with Mitt Romney's delivery yesterday as with the argument itself. Specifically, it's incomprehensible. What on earth would it mean to claim that the Obama administration is unable to say that terrorism exists? Who do Republicans believe the administration thinks it is killing when it approves drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen? What exactly is it that Republicans are trying to say about the attacks in Benghazi? Are we to believe that Democrats are predisposed to blaming terror on spontaneous mobs of Muslim zealots, as opposed to more organised groups of the same? Putting aside the shoddiness of such an analysis, what sort of indictment of the administration is that supposed to imply, in Republican eyes?

What Republicans want to argue is that the inadequate security at the Benghazi consulate, and the statements by the administration that the attack was connected to mass demonstrations against the YouTube clips, prove that Mr Obama is too "soft", whatever that might mean in the currently available context. One reason this case is so hard to make is that America had a consulate in Benghazi as a result of Mr Obama's rather "hard" decision to launch an air war there in support of an indigenous popular revolution and drive Muammar Qaddafi from power. More significant is that the analytical question of whether attacks on American institutions reflect broad religiously motivated anti-Americanism in the Muslim world or are the acts of small terrorist groups is hard to place on a "soft v hard" partisan or ideological grid. It's generally conservative Republicans who want to claim that Islamic extremism is a major geopolitical threat; yet when Republicans argue that the attack in Benghazi was a pre-planned operation by an Islamist terrorist organisation and that the administration was wrong to connect it to mass popular demonstrations against the YouTube clips, they are arguing that the administration is too worried about Islamic extremism. The implications of this argument in terms of softness or hardness are just confusing.

Take the piece by Michael Hayden, the former CIA director, to which Mr Weigel links. Mr Hayden's case is that the Obama administration's belief that the Benghazi attack reflected spontaneous anger over the YouTube clips reflects its "wishful thinking" on terror. Huh? How is the idea that huge numbers of Libyans are anti-American religious zealots prepared to storm our consulates and kill our diplomats over a YouTube clip supposed to constitute "wishful thinking"? The more evidence arises that Benghazi was just a garden-variety terrorist attack on a consulate like those we've seen since the 1990s, the more the administration seems if anything guilty of being too pessimistic. Mr Hayden then argues the administration was guilty of "wishful thinking" when it intervened against Mr Qaddafi, given the subsequent power vacuum in Libya and the rising power of miiitias and foreign-funded extremist groups. Does he think Mr Qaddafi would have survived without the American intervention? Would that have been better for American interests? How about for Libyan citizens? If Mr Qaddafi would have fallen anyway, what is Mr Hayden's point? He doesn't explain; and obviously if the Republican argument rests on the idea that we should have let Muammar Qaddafi slaughter the citizens of Benghazi in February 2011, it's going to be hard for Mr Romney to score points in debates.

There is really just one concrete issue here: security at the Benghazi consulate proved inadequate, and the administration bears responsibility for that. There's a difficult trade-off to be made between protecting diplomats and turning every American institution abroad into a guarded fortress isolated from popular contact (which has already largely happened over the past 15 years). But there doesn't seem to be much ideological valence to that problem. This just isn't the Iranian hostage crisis. The reason Mitt Romney couldn't make a strong partisan argument out of Benghazi at the debate is that it's basically impossible to make a strong partisan argument out of Benghazi.

Which isn't to say that the argument is not, in its own way, significant. Way deep down, deep in the subconscious of this argument, something of importance is hiding. It has to do with the "us-them" framework we build to classify friends and enemies, and the ambivalent way we think when we assign agency, responsibility and legitimacy to potential enemy groups. To say that an action by a group is "spontaneous" is usually to grant it implied legitimacy: this was not pre-planned, so it reflects the group's true feelings. The word "terrorist", meanwhile, is often used the way "outside agitator" was used in the Jim Crow South, to deny legitimacy to acts of protest or political violence. In fact, these words are misleading. The groups that attacked our consulate in Benghazi could be terrorist organisations and still enjoy popular support and political strength, as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Mahdi Army and the Israeli-Jewish Irgun have at various times. (They seem instead to be smaller players who are trying to establish their credentials through violent attacks on out-group targets, a familiar and often successful strategy which we may yet be able to avoid in Libya.) On the other hand, demonstrations can be "spontaneous" and therefore weak or irrelevant, ungrounded in any organisation with staying power; this is why Americans' hopes for colour revolutions that supposedly express "the will of the people" are so often disappointed. (Hegel's line about "confused notions based on the wild idea of the 'people'" is apposite here.)

So to some extent Mr Romney's fumbling over the Benghazi issue grows out of Americans' deep confusion over how to reconcile the potentially anti-American elements in the Arab-spring revolutions with our "us-them" framework. Republicans want to cast Mr Obama as the weak leader who endangers the group by refusing to recognise that "they" are enemies. But who are "they"? To say that the attack was not spontaneous or popular, but was a pre-planned terrorist operation, is to say that "they" are only small terrorist groups, while the Libyan or more generally Arab masses are not necessarily hostile. That sounds like an argument for the current administration's foreign policy, not against it. Basically, Americans can't figure out a coherent way to divide "us" and "them" in the post-Arab-spring Middle East. Republican and Democratic politicians can't either. This is a good thing! It leaves room for rational discourse, or ought to. But it makes it very hard for Mitt Romney to shape a good line of attack in foreign-policy debates.