So Michael Bay made a (reasonably) grown-up movie. Okay this is more of a war/action flick and there’s still plenty to like here for fans of ‘Bayhem’. But it also has a lot to say about domestic politics as the events portrayed had huge ramifications that echoed through the halls of Washington for years. This movie portrays the events of September 11-12, 2012 when Muslim militants attacked and overran the American diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya then launched waves of attacks on a nearby covert CIA annex that was defended by mercenaries.
The subject matter could not be more controversial nor pivotal, as the events exposed shady CIA operations in the area, raised serious questions about whether the ‘Arab Spring’ revolutions in North Africa were legitimately democratic or merely a front for Islamic fundamentalists, and perhaps most influentially exposed huge competency gaps in the Obama administration’s foreign policy. In particular a high-profile failure in leadership by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that stuck with her and contributed significantly to her loss in the 2016 US Presidential Election.
Only US Politics 