An NBC News story from February 2020 (h/t Sarah K. Burris at Raw Story) notes that Trump zeroed in on a far less significant target during his first two years in office and did so for a super-important reason: name recognition.
When intelligence officials briefed President Donald Trump on the most worrisome terrorist threats during the first two years of his tenure, they regularly mentioned the names of the senior terrorist figures the CIA was working hardest to find and kill, including the leader of al Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahri.
…
But he was more interested in a young and less influential figure much farther down the list, according to two people familiar with the briefings, because he recognized the name.
"He would say, 'I've never heard of any of these people. What about Hamza bin Laden?'" one former official said.
"That was the only name he knew," a Pentagon official added.
Okay then! Nice to see Trump approached national security like he was the junior casting director for Celebrity Big Brother.
Of course, Trump did eventually take out Iranian Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani—a big “get,” whose killing nearly bumbled the U.S. military into a shooting war with Iran. Who knows why Trump pulled the trigger on him, as he was hardly a household name. Someone must have told him he was worth 10,000 Chuck E. Cheese Skeeball tickets or something.
The U.S. did also kill Trump’s fave target, Hamza bin Laden—Osama bin Laden’s youngest son—in a 2018 airstrike, but he wasn’t even close to being a top threat, according to intelligence estimates.
As noted in the above NBC News story, one former CIA official in charge of targeting terrorists called Trump’s focus on the young bin Laden an “obsession” and an “example of the president's preference for a 'celebrity' targeted killing versus prioritizing options that could prove better for U.S. security.”
Writing for Just Security in January 2020, that ex-CIA official, Douglas London, states that the "CIA had not overlooked the value in Hamza's name recognition, nor his musings posted by al Qaeda's media cell, but he was young, lacked battlefield experience, and had yet to develop a serious following."
According to London, Hamza bin Laden was hardly a major threat: “Despite intelligence assessments showing the greater dangers posed by Zawahri ... and the unlikelihood Hamza was in the immediate line of succession, the president thought differently. He regularly demanded updates on Hamza and insisted we accelerate our efforts to go after him."
So Biden took out the top terrorist target in the world after Trump essentially passed. The attaboys from the GOP must be coming in fast and furious, eh?
Well …
McCarthy must mean the disaster Donald Trump essentially assured when he signed an awful “surrender agreement” with the Taliban—without giving the country’s legitimate government a seat at the table, right?
Somehow, Minority Bleater McCarthy has forgotten this Trumpian greatest hit, wherein The Former Guy bragged that he’d left Joe Biden no choice other than to pull out of Afghanistan:
Biden’s ex-pal Lindsey Graham was quick to offer a backhanded compliment as well:
Wait, didn’t we just take out a top target that we’d conspicuously failed to eliminate during the 20 years we were in Afghanistan? Maybe Biden actually knew what he was talking about when he said we’d conduct over-the-horizon efforts to fight terrorists in the country.
Of course, if Biden miraculously fed multitudes of starving children with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish, Republicans would bash him for undercutting domestic wheat farmers and stealing Jesus’ intellectual property.
Democrats just can’t win with these folks. But we can win without them. So let’s do that, shall we?
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