WASHINGTON – Did Joe Scarborough really say that Obama’s “own base” was against targeting Osama bin Laden? The ideological nitwittery is staggering.
Eli Lake tried the same tactic on Twitter today, this was my response.
How quickly people, even supposed astute political observers and analysts, forget the words of Candidate Obama:
“We will kill bin Laden. We will crush al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national security priority.” – Candidate Barack Obama, 2007 (h/t Think Progress)
Beyond of the noise, this is Barack Obama’s reset.
Former Pres. Bill Clinton tried and failed to get Osama bin Laden.
Pres. George W. Bush ignored Pres. Clinton’s warnings, then said he wanted him “dead or alive,” but when neither happened he declared “mission accomplished” anyway.
This is an unqualified success for the Obama administration, for CIA’s Leon Panetta who heads to the Pentagon, and the man who captured the hearts of Americans from all political parties in 2008, but who has been struggling mightily to find a way to communicate emotionally and deeply with the American people since he came into office. Domestic policy compromises and capitulation, along with foreign policy expansion in areas that set him beside Pres. Bush, then a midterm collapse, with disgruntled supporters and voters losing interest in his presidency as 2012 revs up.
Pres. Obama gave a much deserved nod to our intelligence community and military ops, who crafted bin Laden’s demise.
… 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.
Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. A small team of Americans carried out the operation with extraordinary courage and capability. No Americans were harmed. They took care to avoid civilian casualties. After a firefight, they killed Osama bin Laden and took custody of his body.
The intelligence and brave military prowess leading to the killing of Osama bin Laden shifts the political dynamic for Pres. Obama in a way no other single event could do. He’s the president at the helm when his team got the mastermind of 9/11. He’s the president who stood to say our intel and military teams had gotten even for a nation. After years of failing, the mission got done on his watch.
To the brave men and women at the C.I.A. who went through so very much, to the fighting men and women who joined up to fight after 9/11, to their families, to the people like Kristen Breitweiser who lost loved ones on that day, this is one moment we’ve all been waiting for, the moment where America was avenged.
How will Pres. Obama turn this victory of his team into something even greater?
Drawing down in Afghanistan earlier, quicker? Or will he see this as a validation of his foreign policy and take strength to continue his current path? Will this give him new energy to focus once again on an Israeli – Palestinian agreement?
Will he turn this moment into capital that can have lasting impact on U.S. foreign policy, as well as engagement across the Middle East, including Libya, where Gadhafi has to be thinking hard right now? What comes next all centers around Obama’s ability to follow through and capitalize on a moment in history he alone inhabits for all time, no matter what else is said about his first term or his presidency to date.
The intelligence coming out is extraordinary. From the briefing by senior administration officials last night on bin Laden’s killing:
[…] Then in August 2010, we found their residence, a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, a town about 35 miles north of Islamabad. The area is relatively affluent, with lots of retired military. It’s also insolated from the natural disasters and terrorist attacks that have afflicted other parts of Pakistan. When we saw the compound where the brothers lived, we were shocked by what we saw — an extraordinarily unique compound. The compound sits on a large plot of land in an area that was relatively secluded when it was built. It is roughly eight times larger than the other homes in the area.
When the compound was built in 2005, it was on the outskirts of the town center, at the end of a narrow dirt road. In the last six years, some residential homes have been built nearby. The physical security measures of the compound are extraordinary. It has 12- to 18-foot walls topped with barbed wire. Internal wall sections — internal walls sectioned off different portions of the compound to provide extra privacy. Access to the compound is restricted by two security gates, and the residents of the compound burn their trash, unlike their neighbors, who put the trash out for collection.
The main structure, a three-story building, has few windows facing the outside of the compound. A terrace on the third floor has a seven-foot wall privacy — has a seven-foot privacy wall.
It’s also noteworthy that the property is valued at approximately $1 million but has no telephone or Internet service connected to it. The brothers had no explainable source of wealth.
Intelligence analysts concluded that this compound was custom built to hide someone of significance. We soon learned that more people were living at the compound than the two brothers and their families. A third family lived there — one whose size and whose makeup matched the bin Laden family members that we believed most likely to be with Osama bin Laden. Our best assessment, based on a large body of reporting from multiple sources, was that bin Laden was living there with several family members, including his youngest wife.
Everything we saw — the extremely elaborate operational security, the brothers’ background and their behavior, and the location and the design of the compound itself was perfectly consistent with what our experts expected bin Laden’s hideout to look like. Keep in mind that two of bin Laden’s gatekeepers, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Faraj al-Libbi, were arrested in the settled areas of Pakistan.
Our analysts looked at this from every angle, considering carefully who other than bin Laden could be at the compound. We conducted red team exercises and other forms of alternative analysis to check our work. No other candidate fit the bill as well as bin Laden did.
So the final conclusion, from an intelligence standpoint, was twofold. We had high confidence that a high-value target was being harbored by the brothers on the compound, and we assessed that there was a strong probability that that person was Osama bin Laden. […]
A senior administration official warned of “heightened threat to the homeland and to U.S. citizens and facilities abroad,” with retaliation a possible reaction to bin Laden’s death.
Osama bin Laden was killed during a Democratic administration, no neoconservative near, with exacting revenge of bad guys, villains and murderers being quintessentially American. It’s John Wayne meets Jack Bauer, only this time the guy’s name at the top is Barack Hussein Obama, at least that’s the analogy in political terms. Democrats need to stand up and do exactly what their ideological opponents would do if this had happened on their White House watch; Joe Scarborough proving my point today, because national security is the favorite club of the GOP.
In reality, Osama bin Laden became a symbol around the world a long time ago, but to most Americans his death means something more.
However, what the success of the surgical raid means in comparison to what Pres. Obama is doing in Afghanistan and Libya is something else entirely.
Taylor Marsh is a Washington based political analyst, writer and commentator on national politics, foreign policy, and women in power. A veteran national politics writer, Taylor’s been writing on the web since 1996. She has reported from the White House, been profiled in the Washington Post, The New Republic, and has been seen on C-SPAN’s Washington Journal, CNN, MSNBC, Al Jazeera English and Al Jazeera Arabic, as well as on radio across the dial and on satellite, including the BBC. Marsh lives in the Washington, D.C. area. This column is cross posted from her blog.