Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, a TomDispatch regular, and author of “Mythic America: Essays.” He blogs at MythicAmerica.us.

Who lost Libya? Indeed, who lost the entire Middle East? Those are the questions lurking behind the endless stream of headlines about “Benghazi-gate.” Here’s the question we should really ask, though: How did a tragic but isolated incident at a U.S. consulate, in a place few Americans had ever heard of, get blown up into a pivotal issue in a too-close-to-call presidential contest?

My short answer: the enduring power of a foreign policy myth that will not die, the decades-old idea that America has an inalienable right to “own” the world and control every place in it. I mean, you can’t lose what you never had.

This campaign season teaches us how little has changed since the early Cold War days when Republican stalwarts screamed, “Who lost China?” More than six decades later, it’s still surprisingly easy to fill the political air with anxiety by charging that we’ve “lost” a country or, worse yet, a whole region that we were somehow supposed to “have.”

The “Who lost...?” formula is something like a magic trick.  There’s no way to grasp how it works until you take your eyes away from those who are shouting alarms and look at what’s going on behind the scenes.

Who’s in Charge Here?

The curious case of the incident in Benghazi was full of surprises from the beginning. It was the rare pundit who didn’t assure us that voters wouldn’t care a whit about foreign affairs this year. It was all going to be “the economy, stupid,” 24/7. And if foreign issues did create a brief stir, surely the questions would be aboutAfghanistan, Pakistan, or China.

Yet for weeks, the deaths of the U.S. Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans became the rallying cry of the campaign to unseat Barack Obama.  What made this even more surprising: when news of the tragedy first broke, it appeared to be stillborn as a political issue.

The day after the attack on the consulate,as the news about the killings was just coming out, Mitt Romney rushed to blast his opponent: “American leadership is necessary to ensure that events in the region don’t spin out of control.” A president must show “resolve in our might” and a readiness to use “overwhelming force.” Barack Obama had failed on all these counts, Romney charged, and the deaths in Benghazi proved it.

The Republican presidential candidate was duly blasted in return for “politicizing” the incident.  It seemed like almost everyone chimed in critically. Even longtime Republican stalwart Ed Rogers wrote that “Romney stumbled,” while “the president said the right things and had the right tone.” 

Romney never retracted anything he said on that first day -- and somehow the same words, once scorned as unfitting and “unpresidential,” were mysteriously transformed into powerful arguments against reelecting the incumbent.  A month later, a new story dominated the headlines: Romney’s criticisms on Libya were now said to be hitting the target, changing the dynamic, playing a major rolein his campaign’s resurgence. 

This change of tune surely reflected in part the media’s primal need for a close presidential contest to keep the public’s interest. At the time of the Libyan incident it was generally agreed that Obama was beginning to pull ahead in the race, potentially decisively, and anything that might boost Romney’s chance was undoubtedly welcome on an editor’s desk.

No matter how hard editors try, though, some stories just don’t stick. But the Libya story stuck. It struck a chord somewhere in the hearts and minds of a lot of Americans. You have to wonder why.

A big part of the answer lies in the power of the key words in Romney’s first statement: “might” and “control.” His strategists grasped a fundamental truth of American politics: The public has an endless appetite for gripping stories about challenges to America’s global might and its right to control the world. So they doubled down and sent their man out to tell the story again.

In his first major foreign policy speech, Romney absolved his opponent of any direct responsibility for the four American deaths, but he pilloried Obama for a far more grievous sin. By a wild leap of imagination, he turned this one incident into the spearhead of a vast assault on America: “Our embassies have been attacked. Our flag has been burned… Our nation was attacked.”

The president’s job is to protect us by dominating our enemies, the challenger proclaimed. It’s our consistent record of victory as well as our values that make America “exceptional” -- and on Obama’s watch, as the incident in Benghazi proved, America and its exceptionalism had gone down for the count. 

This was not simply an exaggerated indictment of presidential “weakness.” As he had on that first day, Romney was again raising a question even more crucial to any popular narrative of American foreign policy: Who’s in charge here?

After all, what’s the point of being the global superpower if not to keep control of events around the world? As Romney put it succinctly: “It is the responsibility of our President to use America’s great power to shape history.” And on that most crucial count, he insisted, Obama had failed dismally and a U.S. ambassador had paid for that failing with his life.

A Bipartisan Mythology

The debates gave Romney a chance to sharpen his attack. In the second of them, Obama deftly deflected the charges about Libya (though he never actually answered them). By the time the third debate rolled around, Romney’s strategists apparently saw no benefit and lots of risk in pressing the Libyan question. But they still saw plenty of benefit in keeping the broader issue alive. So Romney rushed past Libya, saying, “We’ve seen in nation after nation a number of disturbing events.”

He built his case using fearful images: “I see the Middle East with a rising tide of violence, chaos, tumult... You see al-Qaeda rushing in.” Power in Washington needed to be restored to the right hands so that, wearing “the mantle of leadership,” the U.S. could “help the Middle East” turn back “the rising tide of tumult and confusion” and subdue the terrorists. 

Translation: For decades nearly all the governments in the Middle East, the energy heartlands of the planet, were our allies (more precisely, our clients, though that word was never used in polite company). We could build up their militaries, support their autocratic regimes, and count on them to quell any expressions of anti-American sentiment. Now, under Obama, this crucial area of the world, once well under our thumb, was spinning out of control. Lose control by failing to exercise our might and we lose our safety.

Strength, control, and national security are all parts of the same package; nothing matters more to America -- and Obama was letting it all go down the drain. So the Republican story went (with copious document leaks on the Libyan “cover-up” and the like from Congress).What had been considered an Obama strong suit -- he was, after all, the man who took out Osama bin Laden -- suddenly seemed to have been trumped.

The Democrats actually responded by putting out a remarkably similar story about (as the president termed it in the third debate) “strong, steady leadership,” which, they claimed, was preventing the Middle East from spinning out of control. In other words, we hadn’t really lost Libya at all. But that was the only point in dispute.

The debate between Republicans and Democrats wasn’t about goals in the Middle East, where support for autocratic friends like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain is assumed, and both sides agree on the need fordemocratic elections, religious pluralism, a free press, empowering women, strengthening free enterprise capitalism, and destroying Islamist terrorists.

More broadly, both sides agree, as they have for decades, that Washington’s overriding foreign policy goal must be to shape history, control the world, and make it mirror American values and serve American interests. This mythic vision of American foreign policy is a rare example of long-term bipartisan consensus.

When I call it myth, I don’t mean it’s a lie. I mean it’sa foundational narrative of American power that expresses our most basic assumptions about the world, a story in which every nation on the planet is, theoretically, ours to lose.

To most Americans (though not to much of the rest of the world), this narrative does not reflect sheer hubris and intoxication with imperial power. It’s just good common sense. Throughout our history, at the heart of the dominant national mythology has been the assumption that the U.S. should be the world’s “locomotive” and all the other nations “the caboose” (as President Harry Truman’s Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, once said).  The reason for this was simple (at least to Americans): we were the first and greatest nation founded on the universal moral truths that are supposedly self-evident to any reasonable person.

Sure, controlling the world would serve our self-interest in all sorts of tangible ways. However, our primary self-interest, so the myth maintains, always was and always will be the moral improvement -- perhaps even perfection -- of the entire world. By serving ourselves we serve all humanity.

The Fiercest Political Battle of All

The only question worth debating, then, is how we can use our preponderant power and wealth most shrewdly to maintain effective control. Most Americans expect their president to know the answer. At the same time, most Americans worry that he might not.  A more recent pillar of the bipartisan narrative, the myth of homeland insecurity, suggests the opposite. 

According to that myth, no matter how much military strength we have or control we exert, there is always “a rising tide of tumult” somewhere that threatens our national security. At every moment, somewhere in the world, we have something crucial to lose.  The name of the threat can change with surprising ease. But the peril must always be there. It’s essential to the story.

And that story, in turn, is now essential to every presidential contest. As New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once wrote, “Every election has the same narrative: Can the strong father protect the house from invaders?” (Think of Ronald Reagan and the Iran captivity tale or George W. Bush and 9/11.)If one candidate is the incumbent, the question becomes: Has he been a strong enough father to control the world and thereby protect the house?

Every challenger plays on that anxiety, picking the most obvious or convenient example of the day as a hook on which to hang the perennial charges of weakness and peril. Since the “Who lost China?” days, Republicans have played this card especially skillfully.

This year it seemed that a Democrat who “surged” in Afghanistan, killed bin Laden, and personally ran a drone assassination campaign from the White House had, for once, successfully protected his right flank against the predictable GOP attack. Then fate sent the Libyan killings to the Romney campaign, the newsrooms, and a big portion of the American public. Give Romney’s people credit: they sensed the opportunity from day one.

Mitt had to demand “Who lost Libya?” and then transform it into “Who lost the Middle East?” -- not merely to boost his chances but because a big slice of the public yearns for such a “debate.” After all, every time the question of “Who lost [fill in the blank]?” arises, it reaffirms both the reassuring promise that we deserve to control the world and the disturbing anxiety that we might lose what is rightly ours.

What was, for all its tragic dimensions, a minor event in Libya became a central campaign issue because it proved to be this season’s code word for the whole mythological package. For many Americans, the deepest reassurance may come simply from sensing that our traditional mythology -- the familiar lens through which we view our nation and its role in the world -- is still intact.

On the horizon, though, we can dimly see a new question rising: How much longer can this mythology survive? It suffered a major wound in the Vietnam War era, when the fantasy of global control was rudely punctured by reality. That wound has been ripped open again by fruitless wars and conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.

Now, there are so many unsettling changes around the world that we can’t predict, much less control, them. Soon enough -- perhaps by 2020, or even 2016 -- the political battle cry may be: “Who lost the world?”

It’s even possible to imagine that someday Americans will engage in the debate we really need -- about choosing a new paradigm for foreign policy that fits today’s world, where the fantasy of global control has become irrelevant because the facts so obviously contradict it, as American power declines while other nations steadily gain strength.

Don’t expect the old mythology to disappear quietly, though. Old myth versus new myth is the fiercest political battle of all.  

Sean Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton University.

The 2012 presidential campaign may seem like it’s all about the economy, but it’s really being driven by the chief political development of the last 30 years: the Republican Party’s movement further to the ideological right.

Mitt Romney’s attempts to win over his party’s increasingly hard-line base forced him to tack far to the right to win the nomination — which, after his campaign nosedived in September, required him to tack back and present drastically contrasting stances on a wide range of issues.

Compare the Republican Party’s current positions with those of its hero, RonaldReagan. Myths of Reagan’s rigid conservatism abound now, but in the end, what made him a success was precisely that he was not wedded to a hawkish view of the Cold War and how to wage it.

After the Iran-Contra scandal nearly wrecked his administration, Reagan dismissed the neoconservatives involved, embraced reforming Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev and forged an agreement on arms control that hastened the Cold War’s conclusion....

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Rick Perlstein is the author of "Nixonland."

To understand how deeply the moment of George McGovern's efflorescence differs from our own, pick up the biography McGovern authorized a young Time magazine staffer to write as he began his 1972 presidential campaign. The author, Robert Sam Anson, had been taken prisoner in 1970 by Communists guerrillas in Cambodia who put a gun to his head and made him dig his own grave. Anson dedicated the book to these guards! Then, in his preface, he wrote of their profound admiration for George McGovern as a reason why he should be President of the United States.

The logic was a relic of the time. With the lying Richard Nixon following the lying Lyndon Johnson in the White House, the call for open, honest government associated with ascendent Baby Boomers -- and those same voters' longing for a quick end to the Vietnam War, even their suspicion we had picked the wrong side in that War -- seemed to suggest a candidate like McGovern, who had overseen the process of opening the Democratic Party's ossified boss-ridden nominating system, and pledged as president to remove all American forces from Southeast Asia within sixty days, was the Democratic future....

Astore writes regularly for TomDispatch.com and can be reached at wjastore@gmail.com.

There were times during last night's presidential debate on foreign policy when the key question seemed to be which candidate loved Israel more. There were other times when it seemed that the key question was which candidate wanted to make our already steroidal military even more muscle-bound. President Obama appeared to win the debate on points, but Governor Romney also won in the sense that he appeared knowledgeable and steady on national defense and foreign policy, areas in which he lacks experience.

The real winners in last night's debate were not the candidates, but hardliners on Israel and the U.S. military-industrial complex. The real loser in last night's debate was also very clear. It was America. You and me.

And here's why. Clearly, whichever man wins the election in November, the following will continue to be true:

1. The U.S. will continue to spend vast sums on its military, upwards of $700 billion a year, more than the next ten countries in the world combined. Neither candidate proposed a single weapon system that could be cut to save money, with Mr. Romney promising to spend countless scores of billions more on Navy ships and Air Force planes that the military itself has said it doesn't need.

2. The U.S. will continue a losing war effort in Afghanistan at least until the end of 2014, with residual U.S. "training" forces remaining in-country long after the so-called "withdrawal" of U.S. combat troops, which both candidates promised would happen.

3. The U.S. will continue to remain deferential to Israeli desires in the Middle East, with the Israeli tail wagging the American dog, notably with respect to policy against Iran.

4. The U.S. will continue to promote democracy around in world, except in despotic countries that do our bidding.

5. The U.S. will continue to escalate drone strikes on assassination missions of dubious legality, all in the name of killing the bad guys. Neither candidate bothered to address civilian casualties, blowback, or whether they accept the right of other countries to launch their own drones on assassination missions. (In this case I'm guessing that imitation by China or Russia or Iran would not be considered the sincerest form of flattery.)

6. Trade and profit and strutting machismo will continue to drive U.S. foreign policy, not concerns about human rights or planetary health.

7. Despite our wars, our robotic assassination missions, our vast military spending, and our dominance of the international weapons trade (where America truly is number one), both candidates insist that America will remain a beacon of democracy and freedom to the world, the one indispensable nation that is dedicated to peace.

Certain subjects were in essence taboo and left unaddressed, including the perils of global warming and the danger of economic destabilization due to unwanted and unwise fiscal austerity programs in Europe and elsewhere.

True, there were marginal differences between the candidates. Obama stressed the advantages of building coalitions (as with sanctions against Iran) rather than unilateral action by the U.S., whereas Romney stressed "strength" and no apologies. Obama declared terrorism to be the most pressing threat to the U.S., whereas Romney declared it was a nuclear-armed Iran.

Otherwise, both candidates were largely in agreement. And more's the pity to America -- and to the world.

Max Krochmal is an assistant professor of history at Texas Christian University.'

Candidates and pundits frequently refer to the 2012 presidential election as "historic." Yet, the actual content of U.S. history -- the subject I teach at Texas Christian University -- has so far played a very small role in the broader public debate. Voters now must decide whether we wish to learn from our collective heritage.

If we choose to learn from the past, the choice in the Nov. 6 election for president is clear: Barack Obama should be re-elected on the strength of his service to all Americans.

President Obama accurately describes himself as the heir to the legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. He is not a champion of big government, but rather he believes that our political community and economic success depend on the existence of fair rules and a basic safety net....

Ofra Bengio is senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and professor of history at Tel Aviv University.

The turn of the 21^st century marks a definite period of Kurdish awakening. This social revolution is occurring separately within each of the four communities, but also through trans-border activities that are increasingly bringing the groups’ political consciousness together. It is a revolution that is very likely to shake the geostrategic pillars of the Middle East to their foundations.

In some ways, the rising Kurdish wave resembles the somewhat more advanced Tuareg wave in North Africa and the western Sahel. The Tuareg rising has already destroyed the territorial integrity and political order of one state, Mali, and threatens others. The Kurdish rising may very well do the same.

The signs are not hard to read. Most dramatically, the traditionally marginalized Kurds of Syria have found new energy in the cauldron of the Syrian uprising and are now demanding a federal system in which they would gain significant autonomy in a post-Assad Syria. The extremely restive Kurds of Turkey are pressing for what they call democratic autonomy. The Kurds of Iran, typically unremarked upon in the media, are stirring beneath their blanket of obscurity. But most important of all these are the Kurds of Iraq. Iraq was the epicenter of the Kurds’ great leap forward in the early 1990s: the establishment of the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which is a euphemism for a de facto Kurdish state. It is to the KRG experience that Iranian, Syrian and Turkish Kurds increasingly look for lessons and guidance, and rightly so...

Max Boot is a contributing writer to Opinion. He is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, an advisor to the Romney campaign and author of the forthcoming Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present Day.

The attack in Benghazi, which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, was practically the only foreign policy issue to come up in the second presidential debate, and it's sure to come up again in Monday's final debate, which will be entirely devoted to foreign policy.

Last time around, much of the focus was on whether President Obama called it a "terrorist" act. The evidence on this score is ambiguous: In a Rose Garden statement on Sept. 13, the president did decry "acts of terror," but it was not clear whether he was referring to Sept. 11, 2001, in the United States or Sept. 11, 2012, in Libya, and after his remarks, other administration spokesmen preferred to ascribe the attack to spontaneous demonstrations over an anti-Islam video.

But one issue is unambiguous: There has been a crippling and dangerous lack of security in Libya since Moammar Kadafi was overthrown last year with the help of NATO airstrikes. This was an issue that many observers worried about while the war was ongoing: Was there a plan to create security and governance after Kadafi's downfall?..

David A. Bell is Professor of History at Princeton University.

Is your president a socialist who has repeatedly apologized for his country? If you are an American, the answer to this question is no, despite apoplectic Republican claims to the contrary. If you are French, however, it is most certainly yes. Not only is President François Hollande a proud Socialist; this year he has made two high-profile apologies for France. This summer, on the seventieth anniversary of the notorious "vel d’Hiv" roundup of Jews in Paris. he gave a speech acknowledging the country’s guilt in the deportation of Jews to Nazi death camps, And this past week, he ended official denials that the Parisian police had carried out a massacre of Algerian protestors in 1961, and paid homage to the victims. The two statements say a great deal about French public life today, about the country’s relation to its history, and about its widening differences from the United States.

Both of the incidents for which Hollande apologized, in the name of the French Republic, were long hidden from sight. After the liberation of France in 1944, a battered and demoralized population consoled itself with the myth that all but a few traitors and criminals had resisted the Nazi occupation. The deportation of some 76,000 Jews to the death camps was blamed on the Germans. Only slowly, and in large part thanks to the effort of North American historians (especially Robert Paxton of Columbia) did the full sordid story emerge in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the French had in fact supported the collaborationist government of Marshal Philippe Pétain for several years. Many had applauded, enthusiastically, anti-Semitic policies modeled on those of the Nazis. And while it was the Germans who demanded the deportation of Jews from France, the job of identifying, arresting and transporting these Jews was carried out entirely by French authorities, including the horrific, days-long incarceration of 13,000 Jews in the "Vel d’Hiv"—an indoor bicycle racetrack—without adequate food, water or ventilation.

The 1961 massacre similarly remained, for decades, occluded in French public memory. It took place in the final stages of Algeria’s violent struggle for independence against France, after thousands of Algerians living in Paris staged demonstrations in violation of a curfew imposed on them by the Prefect of Police, Maurice Papon. Papon allowed his forces to disperse them with wanton brutality. The police itself gave an official death toll of three, but in fact, as many as 200 Algerians were shot, beaten or trampled to death, with some of their bodies thrown into the Seine River. It took nearly thirty years for French historians to bring these facts to light, and the exact numbers remain hotly debated. This reckoning has been closely linked to the reckoning with Vichy, in part because one of the officials who had organized the deportation of French Jews, only to move unscathed into a brilliant post-war career, was none other than Maurice Papon. Even as the historians revealed his role in the massacre, the French state finally decided to prosecute him for his wartime crimes (convicted in 1998, he died nine years later).

François Hollande is not the first French head of state to apologize for his country’s role in the Holocaust... 

Fouad Ajami is a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and the author of The Syrian Rebellion. 

“I felt hurt on opening my wardrobe and seeing my uniform, school bag and geometry box,” Malala Yousafzai wrote in a diary she kept in the Swat Valley in 2009. “Boys’ schools are opening tomorrow. But the Taliban have banned girls’ education.”

Today, as the Pakistani heroine, now 14, fights for her life in a British hospital, nothing less than the fate of modernity in Pakistan hangs in the balance.

Malala and her devoted father, an educator who ran afoul of the masters of the Taliban, knew the risks, but would not be deterred. The masked assailants, who asked for her by name on a school bus and shot her at point-blank range, came out of a culture of darkness that has wrecked the dreams of those who want Pakistan to be a normal country at peace with itself.

It is hard to believe now that the founding dream of Pakistan, born out of the partition of British India in 1947, was a secular one. The founder of this oddest of nations, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, was a Bombay barrister who was a firm believer in British law and Indian nationalism. He had married his second wife outside the Islamic faith and had wanted nothing to do with the Mughal culture of North India that had yearned for a separate Muslim state.

It was one of modern nationalism’s great paradoxes that this most assimilated and modern of men would be the one to lead his people to the promised land of Pakistan. The creation of this polity came at the very end of Jinnah’s life; the man who moved to Karachi, from his home in Bombay, was old and ravaged by tuberculosis and lung cancer...

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