Oh, on the narrow question of troop deployment, I don't doubt this is true:
Investigators for the Republican majority on a House Armed Services subcommittee tell Fox News they have tentatively determined no military response or rescue plan could have worked in Benghazi because U.S. assets were so poorly postured around the globe that night.
If by "assets" you mean only special forces, embassy security forces supplied by the Marines, and Air Force airlift, I can buy that narrow determination.
But that doesn't mean that no military response or rescue plan could have worked.
You are asking me to believe that with tens of thousands of troops in Europe, we couldn't scrape together an initial platoon of Air Force base security troops, Army MPs or infantry, or anything else for rapid deployment? With the remainder of a company ordered to follow on as soon as possible?
You are asking me to believe that we had nothing that could lift 50 troops to Benghazi? I know Air Force airlift is heavily committed. But there were no VIP transport planes sitting around? Nothing at all?
And if there really were zero aircraft that could have carried troops despite their official designation, that nobody had any phone numbers for private airlines to provide a transport plane in an emergency?
That possibility never occurred to anyone in our European Command or Africa Command in an age when the Air Force air transport is so heavily committed that we routinely use private contractors for transport and even refueling?
It is possible--perhaps even likely for all I know--that no military response or rescue plan could have worked.
But we couldn't know that at the time. We simply couldn't know that we had 7 hours to get to our people on the ground or that it was already over and so too late to do anything.
What I do know is that when we learned our people were under attack, we didn't try to help them. Well, except for the pathetically few civilian security personnel under State Department control who immediately moved toward the sounds of the guns to see what they could do.
With tens of thousands of troops in nearby Europe, we didn't even put in motion a single effing platoon of something--anything--to get to Benghazi in case we could do something.
We didn't send any combat aircraft just to buzz the area as a warning that more power was on the way--even if it was a bluff.
But apparently we couldn't even get a platoon-sized base reaction force into the air to reach Benghazi in a few hours with the balance of a company following an hour or two later--with a battalion gathering as that was done.
Perhaps the platoon would have reached Benghazi and found it was too late to do anything.
But maybe they would have gotten on the ground in time to reinforce the few security people holding out at the CIA compound (the "annex").
Or maybe they would have been able to engage the attackers who assaulted the diplomatic compound where our ambassador was killed. Maybe we could have at least secured the facility and prevented looting and pictures of enemies standing on our ground.
Maybe, even if too late to send into action, such a response would have sent a message to future terrorists that they have limited time to cause mayhem. Perhaps that kind of resolve to react with whatever we have would have meant that embassy security people would have to hold out only for a limited time before attackers withdraw from fear of a response.
But we did not even try to react. If it was because we didn't have forces specifically earmarked for embassy rescue, that's a stunning indictment of a military or civilian leadership that doesn't really think of itself as at war.
If we didn't react because we didn't have a week to polish a plan complete with PowerPoint presentations to make it look nice and glossy, that's a stunning indictment of our leadership.
Because if our senior people felt we were at war, they would have scraped up cooks and typists--and even the officers who usually make PowerPoint presentations--to send to the sound of the guns if that is all they had.
