Bloomberg View: The Right Response in Libya
After Stevens, four ways forward in the Middle East
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Since U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens’s murder in Libya on Sept. 11, the debate about how the U.S. should respond to the Middle East’s turmoil has barely progressed beyond name-calling. Senator John McCain and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, for example, cast the riots and Stevens’s death as a product of U.S. weakness and failed leadership in the region. They say a tougher, more assertive U.S. is the answer.
Yet if we’ve learned anything since Islamist radicals started trying to oust the U.S. from the Middle East with attacks, it’s the folly of using “toughness” as a metric for U.S. policy in the region.