EXACTLY NOTHING -- HILLARY ON THE DOCK

The Republicans created, though their 47 million taxpayer buck hearings on Benghazi and the latest 11 hour marathon questioning of Secretary Clinton, exactly nothing. The anemic Benghazi Committee made other committees like Watergate look like the Nuremberg trials. Thousands upon thousands of hours of testimony taken over the past two years about an event that took four lives less than were taken in the Lebanon bombing killing 241 marines during the Reagan years, the USS Cole which took 17 lives in 2000 or on 9/11 that took three thousand lives.

Republicans may have just handed Hillary Clinton the presidential victory she wants for their barbaric badgering of a very dignified witness under Republicans' own admittedly political questioning solely designed to take the presidential candidate down. Secretary Clinton handled herself with dignity, reservation, maturity and aplomb during 11, let me say that again, 11 straight hours of testimony. She more than stood up to the plate. She hit it out of the park.

This was an investigation in prime time that could have concentrated on issues surrounding the Benghazi tragedy that mattered and ones that had universal foreign policy appeal. The question should be how a nation – an exceptionally expansive one – protects its State Department officials in the war zones to which it sends them. How is foreign policy made, who orders it and at which desk does the buck stop?

The issue for me is why we are in Benghazi in the first place and why is the electorate so far removed from its nation’s war policy? Who ordered the Libyan overthrow of Qaddafi, why was it ordered and what can we do to safeguard our personnel in dangerous milieus like it?

Why is this nation involved in the taking down and propping up of regimes in which the indigenous people of those regions have little or no say? In short, why do we bomb them, take out and put in leadership like quarters in a slot machine agreeable to us but with no consent of the governed. It seems to me, historically, this nation has some experience with the idea of no representation.

Why is this nation sowing upheaval in a part of the world filled with tribal conflict, fractured by internecine relationships and constant acrimonious religious war? Whose side are we on and why? What ammunition gets into the hands of those who ultimately kill us with it when loyalties shift like the desert sand? Finally, why should a nation let any bully on the block control its interests?

The Middle East has been saturated with those who think the west is trying to undermine its religion and its civilization. It is angry when in 1953 the US overthrows by coup a beloved Iranian leader, Mosadeq, because he wanted to nationalize the oil and keep the profits for Iranians. The American oil magnates did not like this particularly and its CIA put a friendly tyrant in place -- the infamous Shah with his deadly secret police, Savak, that wreaked mayhem on the masses and prompted the Iranian Islamic Revolution.

Western boots are all over the Middle East, all over their holy places and all over their deserts to collect the western oxygen -- OIL. That is what Middle East politics is all about post WWII -- drilling for, getting and selling oil, making billionaires more billions while the poor stay poor. That is why our soldiers die while poor people see little of that for which they die. Maybe Middle Eastern ire is incurred because western boots are on their holy lands. Why is this nation all over the Middle East like mud on the bottom of a shoe? Because we need their oil and we take it because we can.

Secretary Clinton could have been asked far more poignant policy questions than she was. The issue has been and always will be oil as long as it is the energy source de jour, vital to the western world’s life force.

Should we have deposed Mosadeq and put the Shah in his place, should we have deposed Kadafhi, Mubarak, Hussein and now depose Assad? All these strong arms kept the lid on their respective prone-to-warring nations. Now that they are gone an environmental vacuum of anarchy and continual war takes their place. Refugees flee to Europe and beyond by the soon-to-be millions. Ask Secretary Clinton about that why doncha? No, Republicans do not want to upset the American foreign policy apple-cart. They like it that way. They simply want to upset Secretary Clinton. Well, they failed miserably at that.