Hope is not a strategy

Unless you are the State Department hoping that the situation in Libya would get better. [Link]

Eric Nordstrom, the man responsible for U.S. Embassy security in Libya this summer, told Congress today that the Obama Administration decided to “hope everything would” change for the better rather than provide additional security.
“So when I requested resources, when I requested assets, instead of supporting those assets, I was criticized,” Nordstrom said during a House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on the security provided to the American personnel in Benghazi. “[T]here was no plan. And it was hope that everything would get better.”
Was the refusal to provide more security caused by budget cuts to embassy security? “No, sir,” Charlene Lamb, the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Programs, told the committee.
Lamb said that the State Department was right not to grant Nordstrom’s request for more security. “We had the correct number of assets in Benghazi on the night of 9/11,” Lamb said, per The Cable, citing the Libyan security personnel.