Last week we all gave Obama credit for making the right decision in authorizing the attack on Osama bin Laden (\u201cOBL\u201d).\u00a0 Some people are assuming that any U.S. President would have given the order to attack OBL.\u00a0 That is not necessarily true.\u00a0 Clinton passed on a chance to get OBL before 9-11.\u00a0 However, after 9-11 any President who failed to authorize a mission to take out Osama bin Laden would be committing political suicide.<\/p>\n
Obama who demanded air time on all the networks for an \u201cemergency\u201d statement from the President of the United States.\u00a0 This was great news, but it was not an emergency.\u00a0 The only emergency was the fear that someone other than Obama would get to make the announcement.\u00a0 The plan was for Obama to break the news and receive a spontaneous wave of adoration that would sweep him to re-election, if not deification.\u00a0 Of course, that strategy didn\u2019t work because the White House leaked like a sieve, and most people knew OBL was dead long before Obama got around to speaking.\u00a0 Perhaps if he hadn\u2019t delayed giving his speech in an obvious attempt to pre-empt Donald Trump on Celebrity Apprentice<\/em>, he might have had more impact.\u00a0<\/p>\n It was bad enough that Obama gave the great I AM speech, but then he set about on a national victory tour.\u00a0 It started with a trip to Ground Zero, a place he had not visited in over two years.\u00a0 He tried to invite Bush to join him, but while Bush has avoided criticizing Obama, he wasn\u2019t about to put up with that nonsense.\u00a0 Obama followed up the trip to Ground Zero with a big pep rally where he gave the Presidential Unit citation to the Navy Seals.\u00a0 This was another obvious attempt to focus the spotlight on himself.<\/p>\n As more and more information is released, it is increasingly clear that this was hardly great Presidential leadership.\u00a0 According to reports, Obama was told in August that our intelligence people thought they knew where OBL was located.\u00a0 The next eight months were spent being double damn sure before Obama would authorize any action.\u00a0 It is important to understand that OBL was in a fenced-in compound that represented no significant challenge to our military.\u00a0 We didn\u2019t spend eight months planning the mission; we spent eight months making sure Obama wouldn\u2019t risk making an embarrassing mistake.\u00a0 Really?\u00a0 It was obvious that the people in the neighborhood knew someone nasty was living there.\u00a0 They didn\u2019t necessarily know it was OBL, but it certainly wasn\u2019t a place where innocent people lived.\u00a0 If our guys had gone in and OBL was not there, we would have just eliminated some other nasty people in his place.\u00a0 Perhaps I am wrong, but I suspect that if George Bush was told in August that our intelligence thought they knew where OBL was located, OBL wouldn\u2019t have made it to Labor Day.\u00a0<\/p>\n After eight months, there was finally enough solid evidence that even Obama was satisfied. (The most surprising thing about this whole deal is that we were able to watch this location for eight months without tipping off OBL.)<\/strong> The National Security Staff approached Obama and requested authority to launch the mission.\u00a0 They were stunned when Obama refused to give the order and had to sleep on it and wait another 16 hours before he could make a decision.\u00a0 That is the opposite of leadership.<\/p>\n After planning this event for about eight months, they seemed to be totally unprepared for what to do afterwards.\u00a0 The decision to kill OBL, take the body, do DNA testing, and then give him a first-class Muslim sendoff is just plain dumb.\u00a0 The Muslim extremists will give us zero credit for handling OBL\u2019s body according to Muslim traditions.\u00a0 They are more likely to be insulted that we would even pretend to do that.\u00a0 While I am convinced we got the right guy; there will be conspiracy theories about OBL that will last a lot longer than any of us.\u00a0 I, frankly, do not understand the thought process.\u00a0 Why didn\u2019t they just capture him, take him some place really special, and just deny the whole thing?\u00a0 They could have used him to roll up the entire al Qaeda network.\u00a0 Just imagine how this would have worked.\u00a0 Every time there was a successful action against al Qaeda, the administration could leak information that they had OBL and that he was singing like a canary.\u00a0 Publicly, of course, they would deny it.\u00a0 Al Qaeda would know that we had OBL, but they probably wouldn\u2019t admit it.\u00a0 This would have reduced OBL from a Muslim martyr to a sniveling snitch.\u00a0 In the Muslim world, getting killed for Allah is hitting the big time, but weeping like a woman when things go wrong isn\u2019t all that inspiring.\u00a0 Even if we had to kill him, we didn\u2019t need to admit it.\u00a0 It could have been a beautiful thing.\u00a0 I fear that most of the decisions were made primarily to benefit Obama\u2019s re-election campaign rather than to deal effectively with a national security issue.<\/p>\n Obama had the chance to step up to the plate and act like a President.\u00a0 Instead, his act was closer to that of a self-absorbed Terrill Owens after he scores a touchdown.\u00a0 It is the difference between class and crass.\u00a0 The majority of the people recognize this.\u00a0 It is obvious that the capture of OBL was the result of great work by our intelligence community and our Special Forces.\u00a0 Only a really na\u00efve Kool-Aid drinker would consider Obama capable of leading this type of operation.<\/p>\n I remain glad he gave the order.\u00a0 At first, I feared the wave of joy over the death of OBL would propel Obama into a second-term President.\u00a0 We don\u2019t have to fear that anymore.\u00a0 In the long run, all he did was provide a vivid demonstration of the difference between class and crass.<\/p>\n \u00a0TDM<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Last week we all gave Obama credit for making the right decision in authorizing the attack on Osama bin Laden (\u201cOBL\u201d).\u00a0 Some people are assuming that any U.S. President would have given the order to attack OBL.\u00a0 That is not … Continue reading