If you were tiring of hearing about the events of September 2012 in Benghazi, Libya before now, you might as well pack up the kids in the car and move to a remote location, because it's going to get a lot worse. Up to this point in time, there have been at least six separate government investigations in the events of September 11th, 2012, that lead to the deaths of the U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens and three other men. The result of all those investigations so far has been the disciplining of four U.S. State Department officials who independent investigators accused of not doing enough to protect Americans during the eight-hour siege of the American consulate. The Republican Party has tried since the event to turn the attack by a group of Libyan Islamist militants and extremists (and possible al-Qaeda fighters) into a denunciation of inaction against President Obama and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is expected to run for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016. These efforts have been largely unsuccessful. In fact, it seemed a little less than a year ago, that the march to turn Benghazi into a way to tar and feather the Democrats had faltered and had been laid aside by Republicans. But when the much-maligned Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, proved to be much more popular than first imagined, the Republicans were left scrambling for a signature issue in a mid-term election year. They rediscovered Benghazi as that issue with the recent appearance of a new e-mail from September 2012 which the GOP says indicates the White House was trying to lie to the American people about the events of that say. So the House Republicans have once again decided to hold special hearings into the issue, with former prosecutor Rep. Trey Gowdy of South Carolina as chairman. Expect the committee to call anyone even remotely connected to the events of that evening to the Capitol to testify, some for the fourth or fifth time. But the seemingly endless investigations into the Benghazi incident have affected the way the U.S. State Department does business in other parts of the Middle East. Officials are now more than likely to always take the 'safest choice' to deal with any potentially dangerous situation, for fear of being called to testify in front of the kind of committee that Gowdy will head. "The shadow of Benghazi hangs over all of these conflicts," Cameron Hudson, the director of the Centre for the Prevention of Genocide at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and a former State Department Sudan policy official told the Huffington Post. "In the era of Benghazi, especially when there was some personal accountability, there's fear of sticking your neck out. Nobody wants to be the guy that OKs some measure of risk, because if it does go south, you're the guy who's going to be called before a Senate hearing. It's always easier to just deny the request." As a result diplomatic teams are being yanked out of areas like the South Sudan, where they would have remained before despite any apparent danger, or at least waited until a later date to withdraw if necessary. On the one hand, aid to these areas, particularly financial aid from U.S. agencies, continues to be distributed. But unlike the past, when it was being managed by people on the ground, it is being managed now by people in Washington. The result is what is being called "Remote Control Diplomacy", a method that is not really very effective - there is nothing like 'being there', as experts put it. "When aid officers can't move around, can't talk to the South Sudanese, can't assess the situation for themselves, they can't do their jobs," Kate Almquist Knopf, who served as the Sudan mission director for USAID in the mid-2000s told the Post. "Programmes were underway that had been designed to meet certain objectives, and all of that changed in December [2013]. If you're not there, you can't redesign your programmes, you can't recalibrate, you can't speak with your partners. If you want to be sure that you're meeting actual needs and not what we think might be the needs, you have to be there." It's also lead to increased criticism from groups like Doctors Without Borders, who have called the response to the South Sudanese crisis 'shameful". The example that comes up again and again is Rwanda, and the genocide that happened there. Experts like Knopf worry that the reaction to the events like the hearing in DC means that the lessons of Rwanda – the need not to pull out at the moment when you are perhaps are needed the most – have been superseded by the Benghazi investigations.
