Ira Chernus: Who lost the World? How Libya Became an Election Issue.N

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 US consulate, in a place few Americans has 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 are no ways 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 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 about Afghanistan, Pakistan, or China. Yet for weeks, the deaths of the Ambassador to Libya, J. Christopher Stevens, and three other Americans became the rallying cry of the campaign to unseat Barack Obama.