The question to haunt the West -- By Wesley Pruden, The Washington Times

When the going gets tough, the tough are supposed to get going. But not in Obama World. Not in Hillary World, either. When the telephone rings at 3 o'clock in the morning the safe response is to let it ring. It might be bad news. Time to turn over and try to get back to sleep.

The Senate Intelligence Committee's long-anticipated and much-feared report on its investigation into what happened at the American legation in Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012, was devastating in its particulars. The senators cite chapter and verse of the kind of incompetence and irresponsibility that we once thought was all you could expect in banana republics and backwaters of the undeveloped world.

But it was more than that: The report, and the official response to it, revealed the truly terrifying. What kind of idiot country are we becoming in this second decade of the 21st century? An official spokesman for the State Department, which imagines it's the keeper of the nation's conscience, suggested that when the going gets tough, the tough run home. Maybe the world is just too dangerous for Americans to get out and about. "Hard decisions must be made when it comes to whether the United States should operate in dangerous overseas locations." Quote, unquote.

There is no understanding of history in the nooks and crannies of this administration, that the United States has never retreated from "operating in dangerous overseas locations," and the day it does the nation is finished. Not so long ago everyone understood that, and gloried in the determination that such a day would never come. Stonewall Jackson warned soldiers "never take counsel with your fears." It was an admonition for one and all.

Franklin D. Roosevelt did not say, on Dec. 8, 1941, that "the empire of Japan" looked pretty tough at Pearl Harbor, with all those bombs and stuff, and maybe Congress should make a "hard decision" to bring everybody home. Really, who would miss all that sand in Hawaii?

Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower did not say, on June 7, 1945, that he had looked over the carnage at Omaha Beach of the day before and cabled the White House that "hard decisions must be made when it comes to whether the United States should operate in dangerous overseas locations." All that rain, not to say anything about the mud, blood and gore, and not an umbrella in anybody's backpack. Who needs Normandy, anyway? Why couldn't everyone just catch a train to Paris and spend the afternoon with an aperitif on the Champs Elysees?

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