Much of the first night of the Republican convention was devoted to bashing Hillary Clinton for her supposed responsibility for the deaths of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans in Benghazi. How ironic, then, that the Republican platform inveighs against “nation-building.”

Here is what it says: “We must rebuild troop numbers and readiness and confirm their mission: Protecting the nation, not nation building.” Why is this ironic? Because the reason why the four Americans died in Benghazi is precisely because of the Obama administration’s failure to engage in nation-building.

That wasn’t the narrative that was being peddled on Monday night, of course. Speaker after speaker tried to resurrect a discredited theory that the Americans could have been saved if some politically correct weenie had not given a “stand down” order to the rescue forces. In fact, this claim is not sustained by the final report of the House Select Committee on Benghazi.

The committee found that the real problem was that the U.S. had no military forces ready in close proximity to Libya to respond to such a contingency. As one news account of the report summed up, “The closest AC-130 gunship was in Afghanistan. There were no armed drones within range of Libya. There was no Marine expeditionary unit, a large seaborne force with its own helicopters, in the Mediterranean Sea. The Africa Command also did not have on hand a force able to respond rapidly to emergencies.” There was also understandable confusion and concern about rushing what few forces might have reached Libya–for instance, some Marines stationed in Spain–into what could have developed into another “Black Hawk Down” scenario.

This was a failure, no doubt, but it is not as simple a failure as the Monday night speakers tried to make out, and it is not one that can easily be laid at Hillary Clinton’s doorstep since the secretary of state is not in the military chain of command.

Oddly enough the administration’s bigger failing went unmentioned. That was its overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi without having in place a plan to stabilize Libya after his downfall. This was a repeat of the mistake that the Bush administration made in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it can be traced to the same intellectual source: antipathy toward nation-building.

The Bush administration came into office convinced that nation-building was a Democratic debacle in the Balkans that it wanted nothing to do with–even though the interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo actually succeeded. As a result, the Bush administration failed to prepare for the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and the Taliban, creating chaos that led to the rise of powerful insurgencies in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Then the Obama administration came into office convinced, with greater justification, that nation-building was a Republican debacle in Iraq and Afghanistan that it wanted nothing to do with. As a result, Obama refused to entertain pleas (such as this article I wrote) for the U.S. and its allies to prepare a peacekeeping force and other assistance to post-Qaddafi Libya. The result, we now know, was to consign Libya to the same kind of chaos that Iraq and Afghanistan experienced, and with similar results: Libya became a playground for terrorists and militias, some of whom killed Ambassador Stevens and his colleagues.

It’s hard for Republicans to discuss this failure, however, at the same time that they are excoriating nation-building. Thus they have to resort to attacking straw men.

The GOP would be better advised to rethink its antipathy to nation-building, which is necessary to win the war on terror and has been necessary to win every other war we have ever fought. World War II and the Korean War, after all, would not look nearly as good in retrospect as they do were it not for the successful nation-building in Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea. The U.S. government would be well advised to do a better job of preparing for nation-building in the future rather than pretending, as the Republican platform does, that this is a distasteful chore that is not the rightful responsibility of military forces.