The ambush-murder, on Tuesday night, of the American Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, and three other Americans in the eastern city of Benghazi, following a violent mob attack on the American consulate there, is the worst in a long string of disquieting episodes that have occurred in Libya in the year since Qaddafi’s overthrow by NATO-backed rebels. At about the same time, mobs stormed the U.S. Embassy in Cairo in neighboring Egypt, though there, thankfully, without loss of life.
The last time an American Ambassador was murdered in his post was in Afghanistan, in February, 1979, when Adolph Dubs was taken hostage and shot dead in Kabul, during violence that followed the Soviet-backed coup that led to the Russian invasion of that country later that year. These new attacks on diplomatic outposts highlight the continuing uncertainties of the region’s evolving relationship with the United States, a result of the volatile forces unleashed in the so-called Arab Spring, which began early last year. In the continuing tug of war by competing groups, not all of them friendly to the U.S., over political power, there may well be more unwelcome surprises to come.
The recent election of a transitional government in Libya saw political moderates of the variety favored by the West sweep the polls, but Islamists, who came out of hiding during the revolution, remain a potent force in the country; some of them regard the U.S. as their ultimate foe. During the past decade, clandestine coöperation took place between U.S. and British intelligence agencies and Qaddafi’s own spy agencies in pursuit of Islamist extremists. A number of Libyans who are now in positions of power and influence were subjected to renditions by the West and tortured and imprisoned at home. Some of these individuals may still be seeking their revenge for past humiliations.
Most worryingly, the rule of law has yet to be established in Libya; there are scores, if not hundreds, of heavily armed militias, many of whom have carried out violent attacks on their rivals in recent months, and some of whom maintain their own clandestine prisons, where they torture and execute their prisoners. Rockets were fired at a British diplomat’s convoy in Benghazi in June. In that incident, no one was hurt, but it may have been the warning of things to come. In a series of ongoing assaults, Salafist extremists have bulldozed ancient historic Sufi shrines around the country on the grounds that they were idolatrous; there has been no punishment for these acts of holy vandalism. In the many tribal and other gun battles in Libya in which people have been killed—and hundreds have died in the aftermath of Qaddafi’s overthrow—there have been no trials, not public, fair ones, anyway.
The Cairo attack was profoundly troubling but still a largely symbolic assault, in which a black, Al Qaeda-style Islamist flag was raised on the Embassy roof to replace the American one—revealing all the more just how fluid things remain in Egypt. In Egypt’s push-me, pull-you revolution, President Mohammed Morsi, a member of the previously banned Muslim Brotherhood, is now in office, a year and a half after the longtime American ally Hosni Mubarak was ousted by his Army generals, who were hoping to appease the throngs in Tahrir Square. Morsi has tried to become his own man while maintaining a careful balancing act between his domestic constituency and his most powerful international alliance—the U.S.—but there are clearly many diverse forces at work in Egypt, plenty of them covertly, hoping to instrumentalize the various forces at play there and, depending on their goals, to redirect the “revolution” according to their interests—to alter it, appease it, or radicalize it. Sometimes, certainly, that includes the use of violence. This time last year, it was the Israeli Embassy in Cairo that was attacked. The assailants were said to have overwhelmed the Egyptian security forces assigned to protect it, but the evidence suggested that there may also have been a lack of zeal on the part of the Egyptian authorities. On this occasion, was the attack on the U.S. Embassy in Cairo an entirely spontaneous event, or a foreseen one? There may be an element of both, though much is unclear at this point.
It is not the first time that mob violence—at times the quickest form of expression available in repressive political environments—has swept the Middle East, or that American embassies have been targeted. In some countries—Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Lebanon all come to mind—the trend is so common as to seem like something of a periodic pastime. Often, such attacks are linked to their country’s security agencies, which, if not directly involved, have allowed them to happen as a way of sending messages of noncompliance to the “big brother” United States on the one hand and to restive populations on the other. Sometimes, as in the case of the Prophet Mohammed cartoon frenzy a few years ago, another Western country—in that case, Denmark—becomes the target of Islamist-inspired religious furies. Last December, the British Embassy in Iran was overrun, an action carried out with clear official backing (much as the U.S. Embassy was stormed with official backing and its diplomats taken hostage in 1979, at the beginning of Iran’s Islamic Revolution).
But in the available pantheon of targetable legations, there is nothing like an American Embassy. This time, the public outrage in Egypt and Libya was reportedly provoked by an anti-Muslim film uploaded on the Internet. It also coincided with the eleventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks by Al Qaeda on the United States. That coincidence, and the fact that the attack on Ambassador Stevens’s convoy was carried out by assailants firing machine guns and anti-tank rockets, suggested that the violence was perhaps not entirely the spontaneous stuff of an outraged religious crowd letting off steam.
Amid the confusion, the Embassy in Cairo issued an early statement—before the attack—condemning the film, and then deplored the attack on its consulate. Hillary Clinton said that religious offense could not be an excuse for violence. Shortly thereafter, it was reported that a U.S. consular employee had been killed. Rather than adopt a quasi-Presidential tone of outrage and regret during an international crisis of the sort in which, presumably, senior American political rivals would normally close ranks, Republican contender Mitt Romney chose to exploit the incident by attacking Barack Obama for the supposedly “disgraceful” nature of his Administration’s condolence. The coded assumption of such accusations, of course, is that Obama is somehow disloyal, not a real American—playing to those who seem never to stop suspecting he is a Muslim himself. That any number of Americans believe such nonsense is sad evidence that we live in deeply polarized times—not only in the world, but at home.
Photograph by STR/AFP/Getty Images.
