Stranger than Fiction: Hollywood Gets Benghazi Right

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

Stephen F. Hayes

Jan 06, 2016

 

"This is a true story." Those words appear onscreen to open 13 Hours, the major motion picture about Benghazi, in theaters on January 15. And with them, director Michael Bay announced that he is taking sides in the long-running debate over the attacks there on September 11, 2012.

 

For three years, the White House and its defenders in the media have characterized the Libya raids as a tragedy, a series of unfortunate events that were utterly unpreventable and for which no one is much to blame. Many of those who were on the ground in Libya, CIA contractors and diplomats alike, see them as something quite different. To them, Benghazi represents bureaucratic indifference and incompetence before the attacks, deadly governmental indecision and fecklessness during the attacks, and official deception and dishonesty after the attacks.

 

This is their story. And the fact that it's a story familiar to readers of The Weekly Standard indicates that Bay, the man behind the blockbuster "Transformers" movies, has taken sides in a way that one might not expect from a successful Hollywood director.

 

 

These are arguments that have been central to the foreign policy case made by both of the GOP frontrunners, albeit with vastly different levels of sophistication. Trump's call for a temporary ban on all Muslim immigration is a crude and offensive amplification of that first theme: It's impossible to identify good Muslims and weed out the bad ones, so ban them all. And Cruz has repeatedly warned about the dangers that can result from changing bad regimes in the greater Middle East.

 

Marco Rubio, who supported the removal of Muammar Qaddafi, consistently criticized how the Obama administration handled the intervention in Libya. He was right to do so and argues that the resulting chaos validated his objections. But his are nuanced arguments, and they come at a time when nuance doesn't seem to be working.

 

Whatever its impact, 13 Hours is a powerful film that is well worth seeing. From beginning to end, it forcefully rejects the sanitized, no-fault version of Benghazi.......................................(Snip)

 

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The Problem With Libya can be found in my 3 small questions

1. What Do You Want?

2. How are You Going To Do It?

 

 

3. And Then What Happens?

 

No one in power (both here and in Europe) asked the 3rd question. We got rid of Qaddafi, then just walked away.