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The Most Gutsiest Act: Obama Gets Osama
“One of the most gutsiest acts of any president in recent memory,” John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism advisor, said today of President Obama’s decision to send a team of Navy Seals into a Pakistani residential compound that circumstantial evidence suggested might be the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden. Since late last night, the world has known how that decision played out. Despite first a weather delay and then death-by-mechanical-failure of one of the two Black Hawk helicopters used in the operation, the Seal team took less than forty minutes to find, identify and kill Bin Laden, to secure another helicopter and to remove themselves and Bin Laden’s body from the country just as the Pakistani air force was scrambling aloft to deal with the violation of air space.
This gripping narrative throws wide the door of reflection on any number of significant topics: the psychological closure we Americans now have nearly ten years post-9/11; the doggedness and diligence of our counter-terrorism boots-on-the-ground in pursuing one Al Qaeda courier for the past six years; the reconsideration of Guantanamo that the “courier intelligence” extracted there will prompt; the impact of Bin Laden’s killing on our Afghanistan sojourn; the waning of Al Qaeda in relationship to the Arab Spring.
But there is only one aspect of Bin Laden’s end that I want to talk about today, and that is what the mission says about Barack Obama. On the one hand, predictably (and sadly, in my mind) the Tea Party gives the President no credit. “Something he had very little to do with,” Judson Phillips says. And of course in one sense this is true. The pursuit of Bin Laden, and more significantly the tracking of the courier who led us finally to Bin Laden, began under President George Bush. The excellence and mastery of the Navy Seals and other American special forces units are not dependent upon any particular occupant of the Oval Office.
At the other end of the political spectrum, well-known liberal pundits like John Nichols at The Nation are already predicting that Osama’s end assures Obama’s re-election. Other Washington heads are succumbing to a spate of Obama spring fever, as well. (See here and here.) What these enthusiasts are forgetting, however, is that we Americans have very short memories. Today it’s Osama/Obama. Tomorrow we will be on to something else. By the time election season is fully under way, the fact that we got Osama on Obama’s watch will be (yawn) old news.
The importance of the Osama mission as a predictor of Obama’s re-election is not the killing itself but rather what its planning and preparation reveal about our president. In short, Obama is a formidable opponent, and right now there is no Republican on the horizon who has what it takes to mount a serious challenge to such prowess. This assertion was the subject of my last post, and today I had promised to move on to how the Republicans can “win” in 2012 without winning the White House.
Since the Osama Operation dramatizes all the Obama qualities I pointed to last Friday, however, let’s take a reprieve from Republicans and look at Obama now in action.
August, 2010. Eight months ago. The CIA follows a six-year trail to a million-dollar compound in a wealthy military officers’ retirement enclave a few hours drive north of the Pakistani capital and concludes that at last they may have found Osama “hiding in plain sight.” Or not. There is no conclusive evidence. Obama orders his counterterrorism and security team to come up with various plans to take Osama down and out.
What is important here, as far as Obama’s leadership is concerned? First of all, there were no leaks, ever, about what was going on inside the working groups in the White House and in the Situation Room for all this time.
Secondly, President Obama’s methodology was the one he promised on the campaign trail, the one he has since carried through with in the White House. Advisors sat; Obama solicited advice from each one; Obama asked for the pros and cons. “He wanted to hear views around the table,” Brennan said of Obama.
Courses of action were laid out. “We early on made provisions for each,” Brennan said. And these contingencies ran the gamut from the compound not being Osama’s to the kind of equipment failure that did indeed occur.
There was never unanimity of opinion that the U.S. should act upon the circumstantial intelligence and extensive reconnoitering. There was never unanimity of opinion on military course of action. In the end, Obama decided to move, and he ruled against a drone attack because he wanted sure evidence that Osama was “got.”
What did Obama tell us in 2007 and 2008? That he would act on good intelligence to get Osama and do it without Pakistani permission. That on all issues he would listen to other people’s views—solicit them. That they would have chairs at the table—but he would have the biggest chair.
This is exactly what President Obama has done here. As I said in my last piece, Americans know where Obama is coming from, and he has the patience and forbearance to carry out complex, drawn-out decision-making.
I rest my case with the presidential peregrinations over the weekend. Obama is a leader who “can hold a tiller and adjust a lens at the same time,” I wrote. This dexterity—compartmentalizing, Press Secretary Jay Carney calls it—is worth detailing.
Friday, as we now know, Obama gave the green light for the secret insertion of the Navy Seals into the foreign soil of Abbottabad, Pakistan. He did not inform the Pakistani government or military. He was acting on circumstantial evidence, if strongly suggestive evidence, that Osama bin Laden was in Abbottabad.
Did the President withdraw to quarters and wait for the outcome of a suspenseful and delicate military operation? one that might define his presidency? No. He went to Alabama and visited with tornado victims; he gave the commencement address at Miami Dade College. On Saturday, back in DC, he delivered witty remarks at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. I noticed that his timing was less sure than last year but, probably like every other journalist, I put that down to the general wear and tear of the office. Meanwhile, even as jokes-host Seth Meyers was quipping about an Osama afternoon show on C-Span and Obama was laughing in reply, the Navy Seals were preparing to launch.
On Sunday, Obama played nine holes of golf and returned to the White House, to the Situation Room (as we have learned) to monitor in real time, and with some kind of video feed or feeds, the 40-minute take-down of Osama.
“Thankfully there was no engagement [with the Pakistani air force],” John Brennan said in today’s White House press conference. The Navy Seals operation was “designed to minimize the prospect of engagement,” Brennan went on to say, most tellingly. This means the possibility for it had been considered.
And yet Barack Obama had the inner discipline to talk to tornado victims, to address a commencement and to putt a few greens with a realm of possibility in mind.
Late Sunday night, when Obama addressed the nation from the East Room about getting Osama, he was speaking to us only after what Brennan called “one data point at a time”—facial recognition, height, preliminary DNA—gave “a growing sense of confidence in accomplishment.” The President “made a decision last night to say ‘we got him,’” Brennan said. In effect, however, Obama was speaking to us without 100% confirmation. And even as he spoke Osama’s body had yet to be buried at sea.
This is leadership.
May 2, 2011
Tomorrow: Republicans!
