Category Archives: War On Terror

Time To Bury…

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…for all time the quaint, pollyannaish notion that the “elite” media exist as anything but a Praetorian Guard for the Democrat party.

CBS News has been busted gundecking coverage of Benghazi that afflicts the Administration narrative

The biggest Benghazi-related story that took place outside of the House Oversight Committee’s hearing room today is this item in Politico, regarding CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson. She’s the reporter who famously drew White House officials’ profane ire over her unapologetic pursuit of the Fast & Furious scandal story; now she’s apparently facing searing criticism from another source: Her own bosses. Why? Because she’s been covering the Benghazi story too aggressively

Read the whole thing.

If Bohner and Cantor don’t get a select committee on Benghazi going yesterday, then what the hell is the point of even having an opposition party?

It’s The People, Stupid

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emailed me a link to this piece, by Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club in re not so much the police response to the Boston Marathon bombing, but our newfound cultural non-response to all sorts of violent threats:

Read the whole thing, natch – but here’s the money quote;

We focus on things because it is prohibited to focus on people. The TSA looks for things — scissors, liquids, shoes, etc — but it doesn’t stop the underwear bomber. People now want to blame “access to guns” for the Tsarnaevs. But it would be uncouth to ask about what they heard from their imam or their teachers.

This is in contrast to the “El Al” system of screening. They look at the man first. “Who are you?” is in many ways more important than “How long are your scissors?” But since we can’t inquire into the man, might as well look into the scissors.

As time passes, more and more acquaintances will come forward saying, “Well, come to think of it he did say this and that and this. …” It will transpire that many knew. Many suspected.

But no one came forward. Why not? Because the system doesn’t do things. It doesn’t do people. It doesn’t do mental strife. But the system has really nifty swords. Armored vehicles, dogs, drones, thermal scanners, .50 cal sniper rifles. Heck, there might even be a minigun or two out in Watertown. Betcha they work real good too. Pity they might have to be used in those neighborhoods.

It’s easier to clean up messes afterwards (and creates more unionized public works jobs!) than to risk the lawsuits involved in getting it right in the first place.

A Crisis Not To Be Wasted

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It’s best to try to engage your opponents’ best arguments; that makes your own arguments stronger.

David Sirota’s Salon piece, “Let’s hope the Boston Marathon bomber is a white American“,  is not one of our opponents’ better arguments:

As we now move into the official Political Aftermath period of the Boston bombing — the period that will determine the long-term legislative fallout of the atrocity — the dynamics of privilege will undoubtedly influence the nation’s collective reaction to the attacks. That’s because privilege tends to determine: 1) which groups are — and are not — collectively denigrated or targeted for the unlawful actions of individuals; and 2) how big and politically game-changing the overall reaction ends up being.

According to Sirota, “white privilege” has prevented white males from coming under the sort of scrutiny that, say, Arabs have for ghastly crimes.

This has been most obvious in the context of recent mass shootings. In those awful episodes, a religious or ethnic minority group lacking such privilege would likely be collectively slandered and/or targeted with surveillance or profiling (or worse) if some of its individuals comprised most of the mass shooters. However, white male privilege means white men are not collectively denigrated/targeted for those shootings — even though most come at the hands of white dudes. 

Likewise, in the context of terrorist attacks, such privilege means white non-Islamic terrorists are typically portrayed not as representative of whole groups or ideologies, but as “lone wolf” threats to be dealt with as isolated law enforcement matters. Meanwhile, non-white or developing-world terrorism suspects are often reflexively portrayed as representative of larger conspiracies, ideologies and religions that must be dealt with as systemic threats — the kind potentially requiring everything from law enforcement action to military operations to civil liberties legislation to foreign policy shifts.

Yeah, it could be the “white privilege”.

Or it could be the fact that nearly all of the Arab mass murderers – from Major Hassan up to the 9/11 hijackers - have actually been members of, or allegedly explicit sympathizers with, major extranational military/terror movements, while the white males have represented tiny fringes of tiny fringes of our society:

By contrast, even though America has seen a consistent barrage of attacks from domestic non-Islamic terrorists, the privilege and double standards baked into our national security ideologies means those attacks have resulted in no systemic action of the scope marshaled against foreign terrorists.

“Consistent barrage?”

The examples Sirota gives (drawn from the lefty idiotblog Crooks and Liars - the only blog in the world that can’t shake its head at what dolts the Daily Kos diary writers are) are largely lone crazies, many of them implicated in “white supremacy” by the thinnest of threads; some of them (John Patrick Bedell) are actually lefties; the article itself considered the Gabby Giffords shooting a “terror attack”.

And beyond that?

In fact, it has been quite the opposite — according to Darryl Johnson, the senior domestic terrorism analyst at the Department of Homeland Security, the conservative movement backlash to merely reporting the rising threat of such domestic terrorism resulted in DHS seriously curtailing its initiatives against that particular threat.

Sirota is apparently writing to an audience of the addled; DHS Secretary Napolitano’s “reporting” (along with her camp followers at the Southern Poverty Law Center) was less “reporting” than “releasing a list of groups that opposed the Democrats”.  The right was correct to mock both “efforts”.

Is there an element of “racism” in the way our society treats crime?  Sure – although the term might better be called “we-ism”.  Everyone in the world is a “we-ist”; they’re more tolerant of people who look, speak and act more like them, and less tolerant of those who don’t.  It’s true of everyone; middle-class black professionals are twitchy around urban Latinos; alpaca-clad Volvo-driving fashionably-gray NPR-listening upper-middle-class white liberals get nervous around leather-wearing Bud-drinking bikers.  Our society is still largely white, and the male half of that majority is, well, male; to the extent that the idea of a “white male majority” includes both David Sirota and, well, me, I guess you could say “we” are more forgiving of people like “us”, whoever they are.

So you could chalk this up to “white privilege”.

Or maybe to the fact that so many Arabs who’ve attacked us have expressed sympathy with the goals of the groups that attacked us in 9/11 (notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of American Arabs are no less American than anyone in Bemidji), while the vast majority of “white terror” suspects have indeed been lone wolves (I mean, if you’re going by evidence rather than Sirota’s fervent, nearly evidence-free wish that it were otherwise) might have something to do with it.

The Marathon Bombing

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As this is written, news reports indicate two bomb blasts along the route of the Boston Marathon have put over 100 in the hospital.

A suspect – reportedly a 20-year-old Saudi national – has reportedly been detained. Reports say the FBI and DHS are checking him for ties to pro-life, Second Amendment or tax protest groups.

UPDATE: The “Saudi national” story came from CBS, and may have been wrong.  We’ll see.

A Live Hero

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Clinton Romesha becomes the fourth living Medal of Honor recipient, for his actions at the ill-fated Forward Operating Base Keating:

“I’m feeling conflicted with this medal I now wear,” Romesha told reporters outside the West Wing after the ceremony. “The joy comes from recognition for us doing our jobs as soldiers on distant battlefields, but is countered by the constant reminder of the loss of our battle buddies, my battle buddies, my soldiers, my friends.”

Eight U.S. soldiers were killed in the fighting and other 22 wounded, including Romesha, who was peppered with shrapnel from a rocket-propelled grenade in the hip, arm and neck. But he fought through his wounds to help lead other soldiers to safety, defend the burning camp from encroaching Taliban fighters, personally taking out at least 10, and retrieve the bodies of the fallen Americans.

And although he’s not a native, I’m going to give a  homer shout-out:

Romesha grew up in the small town of Lake City, Calif., and deployed out of Fort Carson, Colo., fulfilling a tradition of military service shared by his grandfather, his father and his brothers. He now lives in Minot, N.D., with his wife and three children and works in the oil fields.

That’ll be a conversation starter in Minot.

I’d hope to run into the sergeant next time I’m in Minot – but I’d imagine he’ll be busy.

The Poor Little Executive Girl

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I listened to Hillary!’s little outburst in front of Congress yesterday – her “What difference does it make?” outburst, and I thought “Madame de Torquemada just set feminism back 50 years”.  She could not have played the “stop picking on me, I’m a girl” card any more blatantly.

James Taranto:

[WI Senator Ron] Johnson pressed her about the administration’s conflicting explanations for the Sept. 11 attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which killed the ambassador and three other Americans. “With all due respect, the fact is we had four dead Americans,” said the secretary snappishly to the senator. “Was it because of a protest or was it because of guys out for a walk one night decided to go kill some Americans? What difference at this point does it make? It is our job to figure out what happened and do everything we can to prevent it from ever happening again, Senator.”

So it’s “our job to figure out what happened” but it doesn’t make a difference what happened? Huh? What would we do without rhetorical questions? We suppose we’d answer them, as Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin does:

“The answer to her question is clear. An administration that sought, for political purposes, to give the American people the idea that al-Qaeda had been “decimated” and was effectively out of commission had a clear motive during a presidential campaign to mislead the public about Benghazi. The fact that questions are still unanswered about this crime and that Clinton and President Obama seem more interested in burying this story along with the four Americans that died is an outrage that won’t be forgotten.”

Tobin has more faith in the media-addled American attention span than I do – but we’ll certainly do our best.

Especially if she runs for president in 2016. As we watched this exchange, it occurred to us that Mrs. Clinton was back in a familiar role, and an ironic one for someone who is supposed to be a feminist icon. Once again, she was helping the most powerful man in the world dodge accountability for scandalous behavior.

I’m trying to imagine the outrage in the media had Ronald Reagan (or his SecState, George Schultz) said “what difference does it make?” after the Marines were blown up in Beirut.

Hillary’s bit about the 3AM phone call was one of the best lines in the 2008 Democrat primary.  About Obama, it’s been resoundingly true.  But I’m guessing that if a President Clinton got awoken by a 3AM phone call, “what difference does it make?” is not the answer the country’ll need, either.

Fibber McGee & Mali

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With French and African forces bearing down on Islamist rebels, the question arises – is Europe lying to itself about their commitment to Mali?

As Barack Obama declared that “a decade of war is now ending,” French warplanes hit the positions of Islamists who didn’t get the memo.

The re-taking of two Malian towns signified immediate progress for French forces fighting to prevent a Somalia-like failed state in what foreign policy experts call “the largest al Qaeda-controlled space in the world.”  The instability of Mali predates NATO’s Libyan intervention but was significantly exasperated by the fall of Muammar Gaddafi’s regime.  Malian fighters, both for and against Gaddafi, flowed into Libya as fast as arms flowed back into Mali once the major fighting was done (to say nothing of the present violence in Libya).

The French intervention has gained tepid material support from the U.S. and NATO allies (with onerous financial strings attached), showcasing once again the limitations of “leading from behind” – including placing a far from resolute President at the heart of the fighting in the shape of French President François Hollande:

It was supposed to be a quick and dramatic blow that would send the Islamists scurrying back to their hide-outs in northern Mali, buying time for the deployment of an African force to stabilize the situation. Instead it is turning into what looks like a complex and drawn-out military and diplomatic operation that Mr. Hollande’s critics are already calling a desert version of a quagmire, like Vietnam or Afghanistan…

Mr. Hollande, who has a reputation for indecisiveness, has certainly taken on a difficult task. The French are fighting to preserve the integrity of a country that is divided in half, of a state that is broken. They are fighting for the survival of an interim government with no democratic legitimacy that took power in the aftermath of a coup.

Hollande has continued the post-WWII French tradition of an obtuse foreign policy.  Despite saying almost nothing on foreign policy during his campaign, Hollande has at once suggested that France will leave Afghanistan, NATO and yet invade Syria.  It’s little wonder than that France’s stated position on Mali is equally confusing.  An objective of “total conquest” (a charged word when fighting Muslims; or so we’re told when a Republican President says something similar) sounds aggressive and determined.  Instead, it represents something entirely different:

Camille Grand, a defense expert and director of the Foundation for Strategic Research in Paris, said the French objective is “to return to the status quo ante, where those Islamist groups are cornered in the gray zones on the borders, with limited ability to act and not controlling population centers, where it is difficult for them to make raids or take hostages.”

Those goals, he said, are “definitely something that makes sense from a military standpoint. But “if the ultimate objective is to eradicate the presence of radical Islam in the Sahel,” he warned, “it probably won’t happen; it’s a bridge too far for anyone.”

The French offensive is designed to push the National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad (MNLA) back to their southern stronghold – a sort of Malian 38th parallel.  Considering there might be as few as 3,000 Tuareg fighters for the MNLA, the French objective might be quickly reached.  What remains less likely is that a French victory along these lines will accomplish anything.  The MNLA, or an offshoot, will likely just regroup and march north again unless Malian government soliders, which have significantly outnumbered the MNLA, can stand their ground.  Talk of French or NATO training of Malian troops sounds promising, but after a decade-plus of a similar commitment to Afghanistan, the historical results of such training don’t look promising.

So we’re left with Libya – the sequel.  Neither Europe, or NATO, or the U.S. have the stomach to resolve the conflict nor stand aside and watch as Mali falls and al-Qaeda gains a new forward base for attacks abroad.  The moves of the French and others thus far provide limited political or military risk, but also limited to nonexistent gains.  Again, like Libya, if Europe or the West want their preferred side to prevail, they’ll likely have to do most of the fighting themselves.  Considering the nomadic Tuareg opposition (literally translated into “abandoned by God”), are solid guerilla tacticians, a long-term French ground war will inevitably bring French casualties.  The intervention is politically popular in France – for now.  What happens if that changes?  The outlook isn’t good when the man in charge is known as “Flanby,” a type of flan dessert.

The lack of U.S. leadership in the matter isn’t going unnoticed in Europe either.  In the choice of victory or defeat in Mali, the American choice seems to be to vote ‘present.’

From An Undisclosed Policy

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

The State Department’s internal report is out and as a result, Congress is rushing to fortify the barn door.

What I still want to know is: whose idea was it to tone down American consulate security to present a more welcoming, more open appearance to Mid-East locals to enhance America’s image in the world? Who decided Benghazi should be a temporary facility, and an unguarded one at that?

The “welcoming appearance” theory of diplomacy always held the danger our diplomats could be attacked because we intentionally did not cower behind machine-gun toting Marines. But if it was the correct theory, then Benghazi was an unfortunate incident but not cause to fortify and arm up. The fact we’re abandoning the theory makes it look as if we’re rebuking the proponent of the theory and wasn’t that . . . President Obama himself?

So, the President’s idea was wrong: dangerously, stupidly and perhaps even criminally so? Is that what we’re saying? Cuz that’s certainly what it sounds like we’re saying, just not in so many words. Spell it out for me. Was Barak Obama’s signature diplomatic initiative flat wrong?

Joe Doakes

Como Park.

That’d be a great question for our Secretary of State.

If we can ever find her.

The Rhetorical Settlement

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Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:

Even after the Cease-Fire brokered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took effect (at a cost of nearly $50 billion in bribes to various tribes), Palestinians were still shooting missiles into Israel.

You keep using that word “Cease-fire” Hillary. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

If this is what “extending the hand of friendship to Muslims” accomplishes, we might as well go back to Bush’s Cowboy Diplomacy. At least our embassies were safe.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

It’s a rhetorical cease-fire.  One that both sides – the US and Hamas, the ones the Administration really cares about – can wave about at the UN.

As Obsolete As Bayonets

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For the benefit of our Commander in Chief, a look at a recent, modern, counterinsurgency use of the bayonet – which is still issued as standard equipment to infantry around the world:

In May 2004, approximately 20 British troops in Basra were ambushed and forced out of their vehicles by about 100 Shiite militia fighters. When ammunition ran low, the British troops fixed bayonets and charged the enemy. About 20 militiamen were killed in the assault without any British deaths.

Soldiers of the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders – the “Argylls” – who carried out a successful bayonet charge in Basra in 2004, killing 20 Mahdi without casualties. Although to be fair to President Obama, they were not on horseback.  

The bayonet charge appeared to succeed for three main reasons. First, the attack was the first of its kind in that region and captured the element of surprise. Second, enemy fighters probably believed jihadist propaganda stating that coalition troops were cowards unwilling to fight in close combat, further enhancing the element of surprise. Third, the strict discipline of the British troops overwhelmed the ability of the militia fighters to organize a cohesive counteraction.

I can imagine a Scottish squad leader muttering “That’s jooost crrrrezzy enoof to wairk”.

“I Knew That The American People Were Being Misled”

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Lara Logan shreds the Administration’s lies on Afghanistan:

Remember all those years Democrats looked their knowing looks and said “but Bush hasn’t gotten Bin Laden!”, concluding with a smug grin like a toddler who’d just filled a diaper. We’d reply “if they killed Bin Laden tomorrow, the war wouldn’t end” – but they were too busy showing the diaper, apparently, to pay attention.

Sometimes it sucks to be right.

They Read The Book

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I’ve changed my mind. Benghazi was not a terrorist attack.

Terrorism is a tactic. The purpose of terrorism is to create terror in a population. The intended result is the population capitulates to the aggressor rather than continue to suffer terrifying attacks.

More below the jump.

Continue reading →

Things President Obama Did Other Than Talking With Netanyahu

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He’s a busy, busy man.

It was in observance of “Talk Like A Pirate Day”, yesterday.

Perhaps we should respond with “Talk With An Israeli Prime Minister” day…

UPDATE:  As commenter Jeff Rosenberg (Hey, Jeff!) points out, Media Matters has leapt to the President’s defense, noting that the photo above is three years old.

The MM4A piece is silent on what the President was doing.   Playing golf with Jay-Z?  Meeting with (and bowing to) Somali pirates?   Playing video games with his daughters?  At an Eva Longoria fundraiser?  We don’t know.  All we do know is, it wasn’t “meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu at this crucial moment in both nations’ history”.

The Best Years Of Their Lives

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There is nothing I can tell you about 9/11, and what it did for and to this nation, that you haven’t heard a million times from people much smarter than me.

But a while ago, I saw The Best Years Of Our LIves, the 1946 William Wyler classic that won the Academy Award winner for best picture.  It was the story of three servicemen coming home from World War II; a former bank loan officer who’d spent the war as an infantry platoon sergeant; a soda jerk who’d won a Distinguished Flying Cross as a bombardier in a B-17, and a sailor who’d lost both hands when his ship was sunk (played respectively by Fredric March, whose turn as the ex-NCE won the Best Actor Oscar, as well as Dana Andrews as the bombardier and Harold Russell, who had actually lost both hands to an accidental training explosion while serving as a paratrooper, and who won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role).  The movie was about the difficulties the veterans of the day had in re-adjusting to life at home – and shows that the topic didn’t first occur after Vietnam.  If you’ve never watched it, don’t watch another movie until you see it.

It won seven Oscars – and generations of admiration from an America that got it; it told the story that so many veterans couldn’t, and for decades didn’t, tell.

And World War II was different – and almost incomprehensible to people today.  12 million Americans served, out of a population of 160 million; that’s one out of thirteen.  And around 400,000 Americans died of all causes and on all fronts during the war – one out of every thirty that served, one American out of four hundred.  Every family had a servicemember; virtually everyone knew a family that lost someone.

In World War II, just about everyone was close to the war, one way or another.

The War on Terror that switched into its “hot” phase for most of us eleven years ago today has been very different.  While most Americans of all stripes make noises about supporting the troops – and most truly do, in their own way – it’s a whole different world than in the forties.  It’s a detached thing for most Americans.  Less than one percent of Americans serve.  For most Americans, service in the war on terror is something someone else, someone else’s family, does.

In terms of loss?  We’ve suffered around 6,000 military dead in the past 11 years; an incalculable loss of some of our nation’s best people, of course, but about the same death toll as three weeks on Iwo Jima (where the oldest brother of my father’s childhood friends was killed), or two months in the waters off Okinawa (where my ex-father-in-law served).  Most Americans can name someone who died in the service of this country – but for most of America, it involves someone else’s family, someone else’s husband or son or father, frequently from some far corner of their family or social circle.

I was never that someone else.  I came close to joining the service a few times – talked with an Army recruiter in high school and again after college, and with the Navy Reserve when I was in my mid-twenties – but like 99% of Americans, I took a different path.  On 9/11 I was a 38 year old guy with a couple kids and a job in a dotcom that was already failing, with a bad knee.  Not exactly military material.

And so for me, like most of you, this war has been something fought by someone else.  It’s someone else’s family dreading deployments and watching their family climbing onto buses and planes and dreading reports of violence on the news and counting the hours until their loved ones come home, in many cases to start the cycle over again.

And so today I’ll just send my prayers and hopes and best wishes and deepest thanks to all of the “someone elses” out there; all of you who did spend the best years of your lives overseas fighting a war that most of your countrymen barely acknowledge, much less understand.

I’m hoping someone, someday tells your story in the way you deserve it to be told.

What A Difference Five Years Makes

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Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:

I can understand why you’d DO it – we have troops stationed in South Korea so we need to know what the North Koreans are up to – but why would you TELL anybody that you do it?

Signaling something to the Norks like LBJ taking ground then and giving it back in Vietnam? Taunting the North in hopes of provoking an attack so we can invade – Pearl Harbor style – just in time to distract the public from the economy and focus on Obama the War Hero for reelection?

Or is it aimed at China – you might be our largest creditor but you don’t own our country and we’ll spy on your buddies if we want to?

Too much wine for dinner?

Thought it was off the record?

Looking for the Polish Death Camps?

The whole point of black ops is they’re unseen, hidden, never talked about. “If I tell you, I have to kill you” type of stuff. Why take the wrapper off now?

Is that a rhetorical question, Joe?

When Sandy Fluke’s birth control and Barack Obama’s birth certificate isn’t distracting ‘em enough from that 58 and change percent employment rate, they gotta get creative.

Also this: Glowing tribute to the war leader in the NYT. Election year propaganda piece, agonizing decisions by war hero. LBJ stuff again.

Assassination has never been official US government policy. At least, not trumpeted in the media. Why the shift in policy, and was Congress consulted and if not, why aren’t they moving to impeach him?

Here’s the part I love;  a couple of years ago, the Twin Cities’ media “elite” sat in rapt attention as Seymour Hersh claimed that Joint Special Operations Command – the black bag people – were Bush and Cheney’s personal hit squad, assassinating people without recourse or even consulting with…the State Department.  It was going to be in his new book, maaan!

And now?

Even the crickets at the Strib don’t care.

Note that at least two of the victims are specifically identified as Americans. When a federal government official proposes to deprive an American citizen of liberty or property, the Constitution requires that the citizen be given due process including, at a minimum, notice and an opportunity to be heard by an impartial tribunal.

Citizen X is a terrorist? Says who, Axelrod? I’m not arguing there must be an arrest, extradition, legal aid lawyer and televised show trial; but has there at least been some independent review of the charges and the evidence, or is this a secret Star Chamber enemies list and where’s the Constitutional authority for the President to accuse, convict and execute Americans in secret?

I have no problems with a take-no-prisoners approach if we’re serious about it. Go full Roman on them, slay every male, drive the women out of the country weeping, leave no stone atop another, salt the earth. Can’t see Obama doing it. His alternative of picking off bad guys one-by-one really is like Whack-A-Mole in the narcotics or organized crime fighting business. In a world with a billion adherents to a violent religion, there will always be another guy to take the place of the one you just killed, which is why killing Bin Laden didn’t end the problem.

It’s bad enough, trying to pretend Barak Obama reading papers in his office is the equivalent of Teddy Roosevelt leading the charge up San Juan Hill. Having the media polishing the man’s war credentials for electoral benefit by blowing operational security is worse than asinine.

Joe Doakes

Como Park

We live in a city where the media just trampled over (or enabled the trampling over) the law to get a new football stadium.

Think the NYTimes wouldn’t light Barack’s Obama’s cigar with the Bill of Rights?

It Would Be A Cheap Shot…

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…to say “Osama Bin Laden believed CNN, CBS, NBC and MSNBC would be friendly to him” – but it’s hard to read this report  from the left leaning Guardian  as much of anything but:

Osama bin Laden pondered the merits of US television news channels as he considered how to extract the best propaganda benefit from the tenth anniversary of 9/11 last year, and concluded that CBS was “close to being unbiased”.

But an American-born media adviser for al-Qaeda warned Bin Laden to beware of the broadcasters’ “cunning methods” as he described Fox News as a channel in the “abyss” that should “die in anger”, CNN as too close to the US government and MSNBC as questionable after it fired one of its most prominent presenters, Keith Olbermann.

Al Quaeda heart Keith Olberman.

No, no, no – again, a cheap shot, saying “terrorists endorse everyone but Fox”.  That’d wrong, wouldn’t it?

And of special interest to bloggers:

But [Bin Laden] also wondered if it would be good to work with an American channel, suggesting CBS as “close to being unbiased”. Bin Laden added that the organisation should approach a British journalist, Robert Fisk of the Independent, and other reporters to press home the message that the major powers would be better concentrating on climate change than pursuing al-Qaida.

Why yes, that Robert Fisk.

Obama Vs. Carter: The Matchup (Part I)

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Mitt Romney has been making great hay in recent weeks comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter.

In some ways, Carter had it much tougher than Obama did last year, and his big moment of command decision was a much bigger risk.

Mitt was referring to Obama’s (correct) decision to pull the trigger on the Bin Laden raid, of course.  On the one hand, it would have been a tough decision for any President – sending American troops into harm’s way deep inside a “neutral”, “friendly” country on the basis of intelligence tips.

But Obama had at his disposal a military with ten years’ experience fighting a hard war overseas – and at the point of that spear was a special forces community (including many units from all four services, including the SEALs) that has had a decade of very hard experience doing every kind of mission that can be imagined, and some that can’t be.  From tracking fugitives to winning tribal political fights to rescuing hostages, the US military, especially our various special operations forces, have done it all.  And they’ve all done it together – the Navy’s SEALs operate with the Army’s special ops helicopters and the Air Force’s special ops aircraft seamlessly, without the inter service rivalry that so paralyzed earlier US efforts.  And they flew from a base they knew well, in a part of the world in which they now have a total of a decade (maybe two) of experience, using equipment that’s been tried and refined in ten years of continuous conflict.

So while it was a tough decision, “are they capable of pulling it off?” was not one of the variables.

When Jimmy Carter pondered “Operation Eagle Claw” – an incredibly ambitious plan to rescue the American hostages in Iran – he had a few dodgier variables to deal with:

  • The US military had just gone through a traumatic, un-earned defeat, and an equally-traumatic defunding in the wake of Vietnam.  The seventies were a terrible low-point in the US military; there were Army units in Germany rated combat-ineffective due to drugs and crime; equipment was old and unreliable.  Conservatives actually short Carter a bit on defense; a few of the reforms that came to fruition under Reagan first germinated under Carter.
  • The military’s pre-Nunn/Nichols command structure was a breeding ground for political infighting and turf-guarding.  Over-officered and underutilized, the Pentagon’s inter-service rivalries made this year’s GOP primary battle look sane and rational.
  • The various special forces – not really recognizable to anyone who follows the field today – were in disarray, treated with deep suspicion by regular military officers, who regarded them as unreliable, unpredictable cowboys after the uncoordinated way they’d been employed in Vietnam.   And they’d had no real success at rescuing hostages.  While the British Army’s SAS, the German federal police’s GSG9, the Dutch Marines’ BSE and Israel’s Sayaret Matkal had all carried out successful hostage rescues (in buildings, a hijacked plane in Somalia, a railroad train and an airport, respectively), the US military’s attempt at rescuing closely-held hostages, the utterly snake-bit Mayaguez raid in 1975, had been a thoroughly-botched disaster.
  • “Delta”, the US Army’s new counterterrorism unit, was brand new and untried in this sort of action.  While its troops were all experienced and many had seen action in Vietnam, this was its first live raid.  And the other troops involved in the raid – the Navy and Marine choppers and Air Force planes that carried the unit into action, the Rangers that guarded the “Desert One” airbase from which the raid was launched – had never trained together.
  • Helicopters in 1980 were ubiquitous – and still only thirty years old.  They were still famously unreliable – much worse than today. The SEALs rode into Pakistan in choppers that benefitted from the lessons learned the hard way in 1980, not to mention 1991.  Which helped the SEALs, but not Jimmy Carter or Delta on its first big mission.
  • Iran was a much bigger country, more explicitly hostile to the US.
  • Finally, after acknowledging all those variables – the mission itself was much more complex.  It involved flying from an improvised base in a friendly but neutral country (Oman) to an improvised base in the middle of the desert (Desert One), then to another hidden base in the desert (Desert Two), travelling from the base into the heart of Teheran via truck, seizing not only the embassy and the hostages but the stadium across the street to serve as an exfiltration point for the helicopters to land in, and then flying back to Desert One, and thence by plane back to Oman.  That’s a lot of moving parts.

So Jimmy Carter pulled the trigger on a raid with many, many more variables than the Bin Laden raid, all of them bad.

And it showed.  Eagle Claw was a resounding failure, one that took down whatever part of his presidency that the economic stagflation might have left standing.

So a rare bout of kudos to Jimmy Carter.  He held, and played, a much weaker hand than Barack Obama did.

Cringeworthy

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Did you know that John Kerry served in Vietnam Barack Obama ordered the attack on Bin Laden?

It’s true!  He did!

It’s entirely possible that the “Would Romney Have Done It?” ad will be forgotten in a few months, long before the election.

But not if I can help it:

Brandon Webb, a former SEAL who spent 13 years on active duty and served in Iraq and Afghanistan, said: ‘Bush should get partial credit for putting the system in place.

‘Obama inherited a very robust package with regards to special ops and the intelligence community. But Obama deserves credit because he got bin Laden – you can’t take that away from him.

I mean, give credit where it’s due…

‘My friends that work in Special Operations Command (SOCOM) that have been on video teleconferences with Obama on these kill or capture situations say that Obama has no issue whatsoever with making decisions and typically it’s kill. He’s hitting the kill button every time. I have a lot of respect for him for that.’

…with the operative phrase being “where it’s due”.

But he said that many SEALs were dismayed about the amount of publicity the Obama administration had generated about SEAL Team Six, the very existence of which is highly classified.

‘The majority of the SEALs I know are really proud of the operation but it does become “OK, enough is enough – we’re ready to get back to work and step out of the limelight.” They don’t want to be continuously paraded around a global audience like a show dog.

Or a campaign pamphlet.