“13 Hours”

Well, I finally saw 13 Hours.

It’s a very gripping movie, and not really — despite how we know the story turned out — as much of a downer as I had expected it to be.  Nor, although there’s obviously plenty of violence in it, was it unduly graphic.  I went partly out of duty, both as an Arabist and as a political junkie.  But it’s a good film.

It’s not as political as it could have been, and it mentions neither Barack Obama nor his Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, by name.  It scarcely so much as alludes to him, and it never alludes to her.

But the contrast between the action on the ground in Libya and the inaction everywhere else is palpable:  Jet fighter-bombers sitting motionless on the tarmac at an Air Force base only a few hundred miles away.  Earnest faces at the Pentagon and at Africom military headquarters.  A U.S. aerial drone simply watching the events on the ground in Benghazi.  And watching.  And watching.  Desperate appeals for help from within the CIA Annex.  During lulls between attacks, they begin to learn that the violence is being blamed on demonstrators who had supposedly been angered by an anti-Islamic film.  “But there weren’t any demonstrations,” they say.  And none are shown in the film.

Thirteen hours under siege.  Thirteen hours.  And then, after an additional few hours spent waiting (with the bodies of their colleagues and of Ambassador Christopher Stevens) to be extracted from the country, the last survivors of the assault see their aircraft arrive:  “A Libyan transport plane,” one of them says.  “Still no Americans.”

It really is quite an astonishing story.  And it’s a true one.

Mrs. Clinton cannot, must not, be our next president.  That would be an additional outrage.