We may not have been able to alter the results by trying to intervene. But at the time, we had no way of knowing how long the crisis would last.
My concern was that our military leadership was under command influence of our civilian leadership which argued--as the November election approached--that the war on terror was over.
So our military lacked the wartime reaction of "going to the sound of the guns."
Our military seems to have gotten over that delusion:
We learned here in DOD--we learned certain lessons from Benghazi, and one of them was to make sure that because of the instability throughout that arc, all the way from the Levant to the Sahel, we need to be even more forward-leaning than perhaps we are in some other parts of the world.
"Forward-leaning."
In order to march to the sounds of the guns, unless I misread the admiral's intent.
So our military, at least, is at war again.
