Here is my Telegraph Blogs piece on the terrible attack of the US Ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens:

There is no easy diplomatic response to such atrocities. Blaming the host country for poor security does not go far – usually they are as appalled as the rest of us at their embarrassing failure to keep diplomatic guests in their country safe.

There is a clear diplomatic path to follow when it looks as if an assassination has been perpetrated by a home-grown organised group: track down and punish the killers. A superb example is the painstaking work done over some years by the British Embassy in Athens to help the Greek authorities finally break the loathsome left-wing terrorist home-grown group November 17, who in June 2000 murdered our Defence Attaché Stephen Saunders. His wife Heather helped the investigation win much Greek public support by her brave media interviews.

But it is much harder where diplomatic victims are part of a wider symbolic target in a generally lawless situation and are killed indiscriminately at the hands of a suicide bomber (as in Baghdad in 2003, when a car bomb blew up the UN offices and the distinguished UN Special Representative Sergio de Mello was among the victims). After the fiercest public denunciations and slower but painfully expensive new security reviews, life has to continue as best it can – it is close to impossible ever to bring to formal justice those behind the murders.

It has not taken long for the death of Ambassador Stevens to get entangled in the US Presidential elections. The Republicans are pouncing on lugubrious Kumbaya-style Tweets put out by the US Embassy in Cairo before it too was attacked by Islamist extremists protesting at a fatuous marginal anti-Islamic video. The fact that the Tweets have now been quickly deleted (but of course captured elsewhere on the web for us now to mock) is a major presentational State Department own goal…

Amazingly it seems that the hapless US Embassy Tweeters in Cairo were foolishly trying to draw Mark Steyn into their inane burblings. Not wise:

I was flying for much of yesterday and only fitfully checking in with the Internet. But at an airport somewhere along the way, and without having heard a word about what was unfolding in Cairo, I found the U.S. embassy had started putting my Twitter handle in their prodigious and pathetic Twitter feed for Volume One of The Decline And Feed Of The American Empire. This was a fairly typical exchange:

US Embassy Cairo ‏@USEmbassyCairo
@ahmose_i @MarkSteynOnline We believe in respecting religion

Jim Simpson ‏@jamesmsimpson
@USEmbassyCairo @ahmose_I @MarkSteynOnline What about respecting yourselves? What about respecting the country you represent?

This is so embarrassing. We are tweeters in the heart of darkness. The Taliban, the Muslim Brothers, the Ayatollahs and most other fellows paying attention already understand American impotence, the lack of will and strategic honesty, all too well. We could at least cancel the Twitter account and stop advertising it quite so explicitly.

Here is another Telegraph Blogs piece by Michael Weiss praising the work of Chris Stevens in support of civilisation in Libya and beyond:

… we do know quite a bit about Ambassador Stevens, particularly the fact that he was a loud and principled proponent of the Libyan revolution from early on. He acted as the US envoy to the Libyan National Transitional Council and may have been among the key voices to persuade President Obama to back a no-fly zone to protect the civilian population from the depredations of Muammar Gaddafi.

Mr Stevens spent a lot of time in the Middle East and North Africa and grew to love that part of the world, having taught English in Morocco for two years. His legacy will surely be as a staunch defender of the Libyan people’s right to self-determination. And while no one has the right to speak for him now, it would only compound the misery of his murder to read in it some grim irony about the comeuppance of America’s pro-democratic foreign policy…

A dark day for diplomacy.