“We were the last flag flying. It was a matter of time.”

Those are the words of Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Wood, who served as the commander of the Site Security Team defending diplomats in Libya from February to August of this year, when he testified before a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Wednesday afternoon. He was explaining why he was convinced, as soon as he heard about it, that the assault on the American consulate in Benghazi was a terrorist attack, not the “spontaneous” outgrowth of a protest over a film called “The Innocence of Muslims.”

After the testimony of Wood and Eric Nordstrom, who was the regional security officer in Tripoli for a little less than a year, until this July, and other information we learned from Wednesday’s hearing, there can be little doubt: the State Department failed to keep its people in Libya safe. The Department knew that security personnel on the ground there wanted more resources, and they knew the situation in Libya was unstable and potentially extremely dangerous. For whatever reason, though, the people at State back in Washington didn’t listen. “It was abundantly clear that we were not going to get resources until the aftermath of an incident,” Nordstrom testified.

We can’t say for sure that the additional resources would have saved the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens and the three other Americans who died in the attack—there’s no way to prove a counterfactual like that—but there’s reason to suspect that they could have.

We can reasonably say, thanks not just to the hearing but also to the Obama Administration’s belated disclosure and some impressive reporting by people like Eli Lake, that “The Innocence of Muslims” did not lead to the attack. In a sudden shift, the State Department on Tuesday night gave reporters a new story of what happened in Benghazi, one that does not involve any protests over “The Innocence of Muslims,” and contradicts what the Administration said in the days immediately after the attack.

Clearly, there are answers we need about what exactly went wrong and why. At least we can hope that the government learns enough to take steps to save lives in the future.

But it’s unlikely that anything like that will come out of the hearing, which wasn’t so much an exercise in oversight or fact-finding—never mind policy making—as it was a political battle. The committee’s Republicans often seemed more interested in acting outraged for the cameras than in hearing answers from their witnesses. Certainly they appeared to place a higher priority on the question of what the Administration knew and when it knew it—the subject that has the potential of being politically useful—than they did on the question of how something like this could be prevented in the future. Similarly, the committee’s Democrats acted as if their primary job during the hearing was to provide cover for the Administration. By way of example, these were two of the questions that Representative Elijah Cummings, a Democrat from Maryland who’s the ranking member on the committee, asked the State Department’s Charlene Lamb, who took much of the blame for rejecting the requests for additional resources: “You were concerned about the people there?” and “You tried to use your best judgment in making those decisions?”

This is, unfortunately, the way hearings like this tend to work, no matter the subject, and no matter the Administration. The opposition Party prosecutes and grandstands; the President’s Party deflects, covers, and complains. The fact that we are so close to an election only makes matters worse. It’s unrealistic to expect anything else. Still, considering the lives lost, and those still at risk, it would have been nice to see something different for a change.

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Illustration by J. Scott Applewhite/AP.