Ethan Chorin is right: the tragic deaths of four Americans in Benghazi were the main act in a highly destructive outbreak of American partisan warfare, which left key questions unanswered, and pushed the country down a slippery slide of polarization and risk aversion abroad. It shouldn’t have been this way. In contrast to this political theater, Chorin offers a refreshing fact-based analysis with breadth, depth, and new information.
As a former investigator for the Benghazi Committee, I found Chorin’s Benghazi! a compelling read. The second half of the book is familiar territory to me, as I cover many of the same issues - including the Obama administration talking points, the US military response, and the formation of Libyan policy - in my forthcoming book on the Benghazi Committee, Fire Alarm (Lexington, 2023).
Chorin is in a unique place to tell the Benghazi story. A former US diplomat posted to Libya, and a friend of Chris Stevens, Chorin was invited to the mission for dinner the night of the attack, and scheduled to meet with the Ambassador the following morning to “put the US government imprimatur” on a US-Libyan medical partnership he and a colleague catalyzed over the previous year. Chorin and Stevens hoped to draw Washington’s drifting attention back to a city on the brink of chaos following the US-led intervention in Libya in 2011.
For Chorin, the seeds of the attack date back to the George W. Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” of leaders of the Al Qaeda-linked Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) back to Gaddafi in the early 2000s for interrogation and torture, and a subsequent degree of comfort with what some US officials saw as newly-reformed radicals. Chorin correctly points out that the Obama administration’s Benghazi talking points lit the fuse of a mega-scandal in which well-worn partisan dynamics took over. Anticipating Republican attacks just before the 2012 election, the Obama administration sidestepped the question of Al Qaeda involvement in Benghazi to focus instead on the regional reaction to an anti-Islamic video. Republicans then used the public doubt about the narrative to shift blame from Obama to former Secretary of State (and soon-to-be Democratic Presidential nominee) Hillary Clinton.
With respect to the military response, Chorin identifies the problem: “slow response times forced commanders on the ground [in Libya] to make gut-wrenching calls themselves, without guidance from Washington” (page 236). He concludes that Obama and Panetta failed, due to “a system that was unprepared—and in many ways incapable—of reacting quickly to a crisis…” (page 239). I’m not convinced and have a different thought: senior officials did not use the system, as established by doctrine. The joint planning process is precisely designed for a crisis such as Libya, and Panetta and the others in the Pentagon that night did not use it. For Libyan policy, Chorin poignantly identifies questions still left unanswered by four years of political investigations: Was the Obama administration arming Libyan rebels prior to the attacks? Why did the State Department rely on the February 17 Martyrs Brigade? Who were the attackers? Chorin reaches a sound conclusion on the long-term consequences to American diplomacy: Obama, who was always reluctant to get involved in Libya, put an end to expeditionary diplomacy after Benghazi. There would be no more risks under his watch, and Trump would take it a step further—choosing unilateralism and non-intervention as a matter of strategy.
Chorin’s thesis remains intact through the end of Benghazi! The Democrats avenged the politicalization of Benghazi, making the January 6th Committee “an adaptation of the Benghazi drama on American soil” (page 318). The Republicans, in turn, promised to investigate Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal as “Benghazi 2.0.”
With Benghazi!, Chorin accomplishes the rare feat – cutting through the well-entrenched narratives that surround the tragedy of a second 9/11 – to tell us why America’s place in the world cannot be defined through the lens of partisanship.
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Benghazi!: A New History of the Fiasco that Pushed America
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Top reviews from other countries
Ayat Mneina
Informed, important & compelling account of how a city turned into an American scandal - must read!
Reviewed in Canada on November 26, 2022
Ayat Mneina
Reviewed in Canada on November 26, 2022
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Peter G
Excellent story from a close viewpoint by an acknowledged expert
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 13, 2022Sdhaimish
Coherent, smooth insight to a messy subject
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 3, 2022