Why Do Conservatives Care More About Benghazi Than About The Iraq War?

Outside of perhaps Fox News, a/k/a, Faux News, and some of the lunatic fringe elements of the far right, it is now widely accepted that the Iraq War was launched by George W. Bush/Dick Chaney based on lies and manufactured intelligence.  The financial cost to America ranges between $1.7 to $3.0 trillion dollars.  In terms of casualties, a total of 4,491 U.S. service members were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2014, and more than one in four U.S. troops have come home from the Iraq war with health problems that require medical or mental health treatment.  The Benghazi incident in Libya, in comparison, saw four (4) deaths.  Yet American conservatives remain obsessed over Benghazi even though eight committees have failed to show  fault on the part of Barack Obama and/or Hillary Clinton.   Why the obsession on the one and near total silence on the other?  The Foreign Policy offers some thoughts:

I don’t understand the disproportionate focus on a half day in Benghazi vs. more than a decade in Iraq.

When people say they just want the facts, I think: We still don’t know when the decision was made to invade Iraq, or who was involved. We still don’t know why the intelligence was so warped. We don’t even know how many Americans died in Iraq, because there has been very shoddy record-keeping on contractors’ deaths.

Yet some people, many of them in Congress, keep on calling for more info about Benghazi. What am I missing?

I asked some smart friends recently. One, retired Army Col. Charles Krohn, wrote back that:

Tom, it’s easier to understand the simple (Benghazi) than the complicated (Iraq). On the scale of misleading the Republic into acting against its best interests, however, Iraq is a million times more shocking, exactly as you suggest.

There’s another issue, somewhat sensitive. A lot of us (me included) supported the war in Iraq because we believed the WMD argument, especially after Colin Powell embraced it. So it’s a trifle embarrassing for the masses to acknowledge we were manipulated. For those who lost life or limb, embarrassing is hardly an appropriate expression.

That’s disturbing.

The other possible answer?  The reptilian brains of the far right who STILL have not gotten over a black man occupying the White House and the agitators of talk radio..