Defending Obama

I find myself in the unusual position of defending President Obama against his critics. The second guessing has begun about his apparent delay of 16 hours before giving the go order to raid Osama bin Laden's compound.

First up, Don Surber of the Charleston Daily Mail, citing the London Daily Mail (it's confusing - the former paper is in W. Va., the latter in England). The latter wrote,

Barack Obama kept military commanders hanging by declaring he would ’sleep on it’ before taking 16 hours to give the go-ahead to raid Bin Laden’s compound. ...

‘I’m not going to tell you what my decision is now — I’m going to go back and think about it some more,’ said Obama, according to the New York Times. He then added ‘I’m going to make a decision soon.’

To this story, Don offers a pithy, three-word comment.

Then there is a so-called "White House Insider" who says that it was CIA Director Leon Panetta who actually gave the go order, presenting the president with a fait accompli that he simply accepted.

Q: You stated that President Obama was “overruled” by military/intelligence officials regarding the decision to send in military specialists into the Osama Bin Laden compound. Was that accurate?

A: I was told – in these exact terms, “we overruled him.” (Obama) I have since followed up and received further details on exactly what that meant, as well as the specifics of how Leon Panetta worked around the president’s “persistent hesitation to act.” There appears NOT to have been an outright overruling of any specific position by President Obama, simply because there was no specific position from the president to do so. President Obama was, in this case, as in all others, working as an absentee president.

However, like Glenn Reynolds, "I’ll need a lot more convincing. This is telling too many people what they want to hear."

With only a hint of sarcasm, I would respond, "I don't care, Obama is awesome!" At least in this case.

The London Dail Mail also reports, "The delay meant that, in part due to bad weather, the earliest the attack could be carried out was Sunday."

Presumably, the paper means that had the president on Friday ordered the mission to proceed, it would have been carried out about 24 hours earlier than it was. What I want to know is exactly what difference this makes. Bin Laden is dead and a fantastic trove of invaluable documents and hard drives were snatched. What, exactly, is there to criticize?

Apparently, we are supposed to believe that the 16 hours Obama took to take the decision was terribly risky to the success of the operation. After all, what if bin Laden flew the coop between Friday and Sunday? But this is nonsense. No one from Director Panetta on down working the raid knew for a fact that OBL was even there to begin with. If the 16 hours was a window through which OBL might have fled, it was just as much a window through which he might have returned if he was absent from the compound.

Monday morning quarterbacks have no credibility. I do not fault the president for taking the 16 hours to decide. It's easy for straphangers to say how decisive and action-oriented they would have been, but there were incalculable risks to this mission as well as the obvious rewards.

This mission was accomplished with stunning, in fact perfect, success. That's it.

But I do fault the administration for agonizing with the media over whether OBL resisted the SEALs when they burst into the compound and who was the woman OBL reportedly used as a human shield and whether OBL resisted and if so was he armed, blah, blah, blah. These are trivial questions. Also, reports that the mission was a "targeted killing" are just bunk. As Blackfive points out,

Let me assure you right now that there is no such thing as a “Kill only “ mission. If that SEAL operator came through the door to find UBL with his hands up, compliant, and unarmed (including no evidence of a suicide vest) he would have taken a muzzle strike to the face, but not any rounds. He would have swallowed some teeth, been flex cuffed, and dragged roughly out to a marshalling area and then onto the helo. To start out with the story that UBL had used his wife as a shield while shooting at the assaulters and to devolve that into to a woman was wounded and UBL was unarmed and shot in the face is quite a large spectrum of “truth”. Add to that the false notion of the “Kill only” mission, and now you have the entire SEAL community being thrown under the bus as wonton killers of women and unarmed civilians.

And that's the problem. The White House is getting into the weeds with reporters who are political, not military specialists. The president should have thrown this whole issue over to the Pentagon to handle and let it be. In my view, the only answer that needs to be given is, "The SEALs would have captured Osama bin Laden alive if it had been possible. However, during the firefight, they shot bin Laden dead. Such is war. Next!"

Besides, "Let's not bicker and argue about who killed who."

"This is supposed to be a happy occasion!"