Gates praises Obama’s call on bin Laden raid
Where US SecDef Bob Gates says: “I’ve worked for a lot of these guys and this is one of the most courageous calls — decisions — that I think I’ve ever seen a president make.”
Really? REALLY???
Hmmm. Let’s see. If the CIA comes to the POTUS and says “we know where bin Laden is, we can either kill him or not,” is there *really* that much of a decision to make? Bush caught all kinds of hell for *not* killing OBL in the Tora Bora region. Obama not ordering a raid on Osama would have been political suicide, regardless of the facts on the ground.
The only real decision Obama had to make was “aerial bombardment or up close and personal.” Even here, though, there’s not much of a decision to make. Bombardment has two possible and important *negative* outcomes:
1: He gets away, and you don’t know it
2: He doesn’t get away, but his remains get obliterated, and you don’t know if you got him.
This was not a “courageous” decision, any more than a fighter pilot in an F-18 with both engines gone and the left wing blown off makes a “courageous” decision to eject. No more courageous than someone with cancer deciding to undergo radiation treatment rather than, say, relying upon a faith healer. Sure, there are risks involved… but there really isn’t much of an option.
“But what if it had failed?” Well, then it would have failed. Hardly the first time a military operation would have failed. I can’t imagine too many people getting too upset.
This nonstop bleating about the “courage” that Obama showed in making the only decision that a President could got old ten minutes after the news broke that Osama was dead.
Was it the right call? You bet. Was it courageous? No, not really. Especially when he then turned around and started using SEAL Team Six for his own self-promotion. By letting the news out that the US had done what it did, he essentially ruined many prospects for similar raids in the future. If Pakistan were to be taken over by the Jihadis, they have a number of nuclear weapons that the US would certainly like to “confiscate.” Before the OBL raid, SEALs and similar groups might have been able to do it. But now, the Pakistani goverment and people know to a dead certainty that the US is willing to send troops onto their turf, and have stealth helicopters with which to do it. This will *force* the Pakistani government and military to make changes that will onyl make future operations harder. Other high-value Al Queda targets in Pakistan and the rest of the region now have confirmation that the US can hunt down pretty much anybody… and that the US has a whole lot of intelligence that was captured. Rather than keeping a lid on the situation and allowing that intelligence data to be examined and perhaps used on other targets, the Obama administration instead had to “spike the football.”
