Maybe it’s because I’m a liberal; maybe it is because so much time has passed since the 9/11 attacks and I’ve calmed down, but I feel quite a bit uncomfortable spending too much time celebrating the death of Usama bin-Laden. I’m glad we found him. I’m glad we killed him. But I don’t want to dance in the end zone. I also don’t want to give the impression that I think the president’s greatest accomplishment is that he had someone killed.
Nonetheless, this garbage needs to be answered. The idiots who still work over at Breitbart’s operation are questioning whether the president deserves any credit for authorizing the mission that got bin-Laden, and their conclusion is that he not only deserves no credit but that he was looking to cover his ass if anything went wrong. Their evidence is the note that then CIA director Leon Panetta released to Time magazine:
Received phone call from Tom Donilon who stated that the President made a decision with regard to AC1 [Abbottabad Compound 1]. The decision is to proceed with the assault.
The timing, operational decision making and control are in Admiral McRaven’s hands. The approval is provided on the risk profile presented to the President. Any additional risks are to be brought back to the President for his consideration. The direction is to go in and get bin Laden and if he is not there, to get out. Those instructions were conveyed to Admiral McRaven at approximately 10:45 am.
From this, the Breitbart clowns conclude that:
…the memo doesn’t show a gutsy call. It doesn’t show a president willing to take the blame for a mission gone wrong. It shows a CYA maneuver by the White House.
The memo puts all control in the hands of Admiral McRaven – the “timing, operational decision making and control” are all up to McRaven. So the notion that Obama and his team were walking through every stage of the operation is incorrect. The hero here was McRaven, not Obama. And had the mission gone wrong, McRaven surely would have been thrown under the bus.
On at least one critically important point, the president exercised operational control. After ignoring the advice of his defense secretary, vice president, and others, he ruled out a bombing mission and he ruled out doing nothing. He then ordered Admiral McRaven to do draw up a plan for a helicopter raid. When he reviewed that plan, he wasn’t satisfied with it. Here’s Military.com, a source the wingnuts might respect:
About 10 days before the raid, Obama was briefed on the plan. It included keeping two backup helicopters just outside Pakistani airspace in case something went wrong. But Obama felt that was risky. If the SEALs needed help, they couldn’t afford to wait for backup.
He said the operation needed a plan in case the SEALs had to fight their way out. So two Chinooks were sent into Pakistani airspace, loaded with backup teams, just in case. One of those Chinooks landed in the compound after the Black Hawk became inoperable.
The raiders scrambled aboard the remaining Black Hawk and a Chinook, bin Laden’s body with them, and flew to the USS Carl Vinson in the North Arabian Sea. The ground operation had taken about 40 minutes.
Not only did the president insert the Chinooks into the operational plan, but that decision proved critical to the success of the mission. Unless you expect the president to serve as the operational commander of our Special Forces, something he isn’t trained to do, then I don’t know what more you can demand from him.
He made a decision to intrude on Pakistan’s sovereignty and to have commandos raid an armed compound in the middle of a city (Pakistan’s version of West Point, no less) in the middle of the night. There was a chance that bin-Laden wasn’t there. There was a chance that they’d kill innocent people. There was a chance that the commandos would be killed or captured. An international incident was assured regardless of the outcome of the raid. And Obama didn’t have the cover of unanimity among his advisers. His defense secretary, a Republican, was against it.
He considered all that, and then he ordered the mission anyway. And it went according to plan. And the one thing that went wrong (the helicopter crash) was only put right because of Obama’s intervention in the operational plan.
I ask you, in all honesty, what more could you possibly ask from a commander in chief than that he avenge the death of 3,000 innocent American victims by ordering a cross-border raid on uncertain intelligence, causing a row with one of our most uneasy allies, while making the operational tweak that led to success, and that it all turn out perfectly?
If you wanted to critique him for recklessness, that would be a better argument than to suggest he lacks guts.
