0 of gadhafi. every tribe fighting for a piece of the post gadhafi pie. chose to stay and help libya move forward and certainly that was a decision with very significant far reaching consequence consequences. >> i want to bring the panel in, what struck me, very thorough research in "the new york times." went to 2014, hillary clinton, essentially an accusation "new york times" is intervening to help democrats politically. what is that about? republican not going to accept any conclusion that doesn't tar hillary clinton for 2014, i mean 2016. is this all about electoral politics and not the facts? >> a lot of it is. when we talked about scandal, #benghazi. meaning hillary clinton sounding too callous in front of the senate panel, al qaeda connection. john mccain said it was ridiculous the idea there was spontaneous element, people would show up at a rally with bazookas. if six of them don't work, one would. if they get a reset, republicans should reset the narrative, general critique of obama administration weakness in the middle east and a critic whether this administration was too rosey and optimistic the way bush administration was about how easy to democratize middle east. like rand paul maybe won't go with that. if they want to use that, they have a lot to attack hillary with. >> what about the need to be al qaeda. the attack in itself is tragic enough. there does seem to be what republicans are pushing back on, problem? >> we're missing all the opportunities. for me benghazi was always about a witch hunt and connecting it to impeachment. it was all during irs scandals, nsa, euro scandals 2013. for me they never really wanted to get to the bottom of what actually happened. they always just wanted to use it as a political football. it didn't work in 2012, again in 2016 and don't care about getting to the core of the problem. >> how convenient the messenger is "the new york times." >> what "the new york times" report sheds light on, the more you look what happened, the less interesting and scandalous it is and the more inconclusive it is. there's evidence that there's an element of spontaneity, some evidence some planning may have been at play there. there's evidence there may have been have sort of link to al qaeda. there's evidence that may not have been the case. there's evidence anti-islam video had some role to play. there's evidence it might not have. this adds up to, what i we talked about, an intelligence failure, horrible tragedy but not a lot of mischief and coverups. that's the question. in it's also important to look at this from a political lens to understand what's really happening because that's what this is about. not only satisfying the republican -- their strong belief in their gut the white house is full of liars and mischiefmakers but also hillary clinton in 2016. >> draining political capital out of killing osama bin laden, central tenet of obama foreign policy he had broken al qaeda. >> that's what republicans focused on at the end of the 2012 campaign. he was lying to us, al qaeda is as dangerous as it always was. it blew apart this consulate. they have to move on from that. that's the problem. if you want to prevent future benghazi pull resources out of the area like this or put more resources in. that's what would have prevented on the night. >> it's true that this ideology is resurgent, read through the lens whether we should support moderate rebel factions in syria, we have no capacity to figure out who is moderate and who is not. we should be extremely humble about this. if i were barack obama reading this, i would say the lesson to me would be my caution about going in a big way in syria, the belief we can distinguish good guys from bad guys, i was wise to be cautious. >> peter you've gotten to the bigger picture question we want to get to. hold on. coming up latest violent demonstrations in egypt to power vacuum in syria, foreign policy weigh on the u.s. heading into the new year. we will discuss rising tensions with p.j. and mohyeldin. >> questions about the sochi olympics. the next from moscow.