Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took full responsibilityfor the security situation during the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi, saying that the State Department held full control over embassy security and not the White House.

The attack on the US consulate in Benghazi has become a political football, in ways that the father of slain US Ambassador Chris Stevens wants to see stopped. That’s not likely, as both sides highlight the aspects of the story to their advantage, and suppress the aspects that present vulnerabilities.

Protests and attacks continued at Western embassies across the Middle East and North Africa today, and at this point they have little relationship to the anti-Muslim film “The Innocence of Muslims.” A reporter for the Times of London asked protesters outside the US Embassy in Sanaa, Yemen, yesterday if they watched the clip of the film online, and to a man all of them said they hadn’t. The film is a pretext to stir up sentiments among a small but determined band of agitators. I’m not sure we can say too much about the sentiments of the populations of these Arab countries as a whole, but we can say that they contain at least an element of anti-Westernism.

A tragedy in Libya provoked by a film insulting Islam has turned into an attempt by Mitt Romney to take umbrage with the White House. The US Ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in Benghazi at an attack on the US consulate, hit by a rocket-propelled grenade as they tried to flee. The attackers in Benghazi followed the lead of protesters at the US Embassy in Cairo, Egypt, who pulled down the US flag and tried to burn it.

The United States closed its embassy in Syria today, in response to continuing attacks by security forces in Homs that have escalated the death toll in the uprising. Nothing that the international community has done thus far has led to any pullback in efforts by Bashar al-Assad to use his security forces to crush the uprising.

The President has announced the full withdrawal of US military troops from Iraq. This was put out a week ago unofficially, and then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta (who’s a terrible Defense Secretary, by the way) tried half-heartedly to walk it back. But the decision has now been made.