With the death of Osama bin Laden, there will be much attention paid to a number of important issues: the strategic and tactical details of the operation; the information sources used to make the effort a success; Pakistan's overall involvement in the hiding and subsequent finding of the world's most wanted criminal; the political implications at home here in America as well as abroad; and much else besides. It will be interesting to learn all we can about the actions of President Obama and the intelligence services over the course of the operation that finally brought Osama Bin Laden to well-deserved justice.
One key point that will often be noted is the careful planning involved: our President and Commander-in-Chief knew Bin Laden's probable location for months, but waited and organized with meticulous diligence and patience before greenlighting the attack on the Bin Laden compound, resulting in the death of the terrorist mastermind with minimal civilian and no American casualties. It was a patience and painstaking care that serves as a conspicuous contrast with Mr. Obama's predecessor in the White House, who was better known for his impulsive gut-based decision-making process.
But overlooked in all of this analysis is an examination not of what President Obama did, but of what he did not do: a detail that serves more than any other to illustrate the character of our President, particularly compared to that of the man in the Oval Office who failed over the course of seven years to bring closure and justice to millions of expectant Americans.
From President Obama's speech announcing the news:
And so shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of bin Laden the top priority of our war against al Qaeda, even as we continued our broader efforts to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat his network.
Then, last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to bin Laden. It was far from certain, and it took many months to run this thread to ground. I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.
Recall that during the critical months at the beginning of this operation, Republicans were engaged in demagoguery of all sorts attacking Democrats for, among other things, lack of adequate patriotism. Conservative commentators like Glenn Beck were openly accusing the President and Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Armed Forces of helping to institute a worldwide Islamic caliphate.
In October of 2010, Democrats were staring down the barrel of an electoral perfect storm, reaping the consequences mainly of an enduring recession caused by Wall St. irresponsibility and greed, and a deficit caused by George W. Bush's wars and tax cuts for the wealthy. Republicans and their conservative policies had put Democrats in a bind and the nation at risk of fiscal collapse, and they were determined to make Democrats be the ones to suffer the electoral consequences of their own reckless actions--actions which had included the supremely irresponsible decision to invade Iraq while letting Osama Bin Laden run free because the Republican President George W. Bush just didn't spend that much time thinking about him.
It would have been very easy for a career Democratic politician in the Oval Office to look cynically at the situation, and rationalize a rushed decision to go after Osama Bin Laden in a risky October surprise move to pull Democrats from the brink of undeserved disaster at the polls. But this President did not pull the trigger. This President waited patiently to make sure the job was done right, not in accordance with his political convenience.
When George W. Bush faced similar electoral challenges, he and his brain trust did what Americans have come to expect from them: they toyed with national security to serve their own selfish ends, in no small part by manipulating terror alerts to heighten public anxiety whenever President Bush noticed a drop in his poll numbers. George W. Bush's own Homeland Security Chief Tom Ridge admitted as much:
Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge has a new book out.
In “The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege,” the Pennsylvania Republican tells a story of how Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft pressured him to raise the terror alert just before the 2004 election. He opted not to.
And he confesses that he regretted inserting language in an Aug. 1, 2004, terror alert – issued just as Democrat John Kerry was enjoying a post-convention bump in the polls -- that he now thinks might have been politically motivated. The language, requested by the White House, praised President Bush’s handling of the terrorist threat to national security. "I'm not going to second-guess [motive]," he told Time magazine. "But it was wrong for me to put it in."
Can there be any doubt that had a Republican President like John McCain been in the White House in October 2010, and been faced with a similar political predicament as that encountered by President Obama and the Democratic Party, he would have hesitated to attempt an October surprise? It seems likely that in this situation as in all others, politics would have trumped good policy for Republicans.
In the end, what President Obama did not do in Pakistan in October 2010 says as much about his personal character and serious approach to public policy as what he did do in April and May 2011 to help bring the mission to a successful conclusion. And it serves as one of the starkest contrasts with his predecessor in the White House.