Book Review: Dark Forces

Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghaziby Kenneth R. TimmermanBroadside Books, 2014The tragedy that happened on 11 September 2012 at the U. S. compound in Benghazi happened fast and was extremely stark: a large contingent of armed men stormed the building a few hours after sunset, probably intent on killing or capturing U. S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens, whom they'd recently learned was on the premises virtually undefended. His one guard quickly ushered him and communications officer Sean Smith into a "safe room," and when the intruders couldn't break in, they set fire to the drapes and furniture of the adjoining room, almost immediately filling the space with dense black smoke.Stevens and Smith died soon after, overcome by smoke, and hours later two of the special operatives desperately trying to defend and evacuate the U.S. compound also died, killed by the weapons fire of the men ringing the buildings. It was a personal, political, and diplomatic disaster, and it's naturally sparked heated debate ever since - and that debate will only grow louder if then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton runs for president in 2016. If Clinton runs, every one of her opponents will recite "Benghazi" morning, noon, and night like monks at prayer.Those opponents won't be able to make much use of a book like Mitchell Zuckoff's recent 13 Hours in Benghazi, which strives to avoid politics and simply give a moment-by-moment narrative of what happened that night - but hoo boy, will those opponents be able to make use of Kenneth Timmerman's new book Dark Forces: The Truth About What Happened in Benghazi. This isn't all that surprising, since Timmerman himself is one of those enemies, an ardent Republican and frequent candidate for high office, somebody with an ample predisposition to blacken the name of Hillary Clinton. It gives his book its hyper-readable bite and makes it measurably dismissable.Of course you have to worry whenever an author rounds out his Acknowledgements with a nod like this to his anonymous sources: "Others I cannot name. You know who you are. It is my honor to say that, together, we serve the cause of freedom."It's a tough row to hoe, picking nits on a book written in the cause of freedom, but when Timmerman asks "What really happened in Benghazi" we naturally want to follow him while he searches for answers. "We know one thing for sure," he tells us:

The story concocted by the Obama administration on the night of the attack, of a demonstration caused by an Internet movie that went out of control, bears no resemblance to the truth. It's not even close.

But it turns out he's willing - eager, even - to assert that we know a lot more than this one thing; his book purports to be absolutely bursting with revelations. The original and still official line the Obama administration took on the Benghazi attack was that it arose in large part from local outrage over an "Internet movie" disrespectful of Islam - that it was in some measure spontaneous and therefore unpredictable. The counter-line, respected and considerably elaborated by Timmerman, is that the State Department consistently denied the Benghazi compound's request for adequate security (and ignored or hushed up reports of increased unrest in the area), partly out of a desire to obscure the CIA's extensive gun-running operation to al-Qaeda-linked Libyan rebels against dictator Muammar Qaddafi ("who had," Timmerman reminds us, " voluntarily ended his WMD programs and cut off his support to international terrorist groups, in hopes of becoming a friend of the West") - and partly out of a cavalier wickedness. Timmerman lays out this case with an angry thoroughness that often has him swiping in all directions like a bear woken too early from hibernation. It leads to many passages like this one, just slopped all over with all-purpose indignation:

It's hard to believe that a U.S. president could once look to Libya as a success story. To most Americans, Libya has become synonymous with chaos, a wild and dangerous place where, as in Iraq, American dreams of democracy went to die. President Obama's hesitation to use U.S. military might against Qaddafi in early 2011 prompted his political opponents to accuse him of leading from behind, even though U.S. aircraft, U.S. airmen, and U.S. taxpayers bore the brunt of the NATO-led no-fly zone over Libya during the first few months of the conflict, at a cost to taxpayers of $550 million for the first two weeks alone.

So all of U.S. policy in Libya has always been wrong-headed? So President Obama's hesitation to start a ground war against Qaddafi was wrong-headed? So his opponents' accusations that such hesitation meant the president was weak, those accusations were wrong-headed? So the expensive no-fly zone was wrong-headed? So Timmerman and his handy, workhorse "even though" is advocating withdrawal from Libya? War with Libya? Less expensive war with Libya? Less whinging taxpayers? It all works, and - and or also - none of it does. He's just so fed up.As in Mitchell Zuckoff's book, Timmerman's account can scarcely fail to make dramatic and saddening reading. Ambassador Stevens was a genuine believer in the light of American diplomacy, Sean Smith the quintessential civilian family man simply trying to get through a work-day far from home, and the two special ops the kind of bluff, brave figures who seem ready-made for Hollywood adaptation; the story of the chaotic night during which these four men lost their lives has a resonance quite independent of the murky political context in which it all happened. Although Timmerman stoops to many of the same hack-journalist melodramatic tricks that Zuckoff does, his book has been energetically researched and doesn't have a single dull page. It's only the charged partisan atmosphere of the thing that will give pause to any reader looking for a sober, objective assessment of Benghazi.Timmerman levels some extremely serious allegations against the Obama administration in general and Hillary Clinton specifically, and he's not shy about drawing big-name comparisons. "No Americans died during Watergate or as a result of Iran-Contra," he writes. "That is what makes the attacks of September 11, 2012, in Libya the deepest, the darkest, and the dirtiest political scandal of recent American history."That deep, dark, dirty, deceptive, demoralizing, deceitful, disgraceful, disgusting (and ... Democratic?) scandal will certainly take on a ghastly second life in the public spotlight if Clinton decides to run for president. And in the meantime, perhaps there'll be other Benghazi books? We've had the soldiers'-eye-view, and we've had the case for the prosecution - that still leaves some angles uncovered, right?