Mitt Romney has been making great hay in recent weeks comparing Obama to Jimmy Carter.<\/p>\n
In some ways, Carter had it much <\/em>tougher than Obama did last year, and his big moment of command decision was a much bigger risk.<\/p>\n Mitt was referring to Obama’s (correct) decision to pull the trigger on the Bin Laden raid, of course. \u00a0On 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.<\/p>\n 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. \u00a0From tracking fugitives to winning tribal political fights to rescuing hostages, the US military, especially our various special operations forces, have done it all. \u00a0And 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. \u00a0And 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.<\/p>\n So while it was a tough decision, “are they capable of pulling it off?” was not one of the variables.<\/p>\n 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:<\/p>\n So Jimmy Carter pulled the trigger on a raid with many, many more variables than the Bin Laden raid, all of them bad.<\/p>\n\n