President Obama seems to have stepped in it again. He has taken an event that should have been a uniting feature of the War on Terror—the killing of Osama bin Laden one year ago—and turned it into a partisan political ploy. A new ad has Bill Clinton—Bill Clinton, mind you—praising the courage and leadership of Obama as he made the decision to proceed with the raid that led to bin Laden’s death.
Now, I’m not going to detract from the significance of making that decision. It was the right call. But then the ad goes on to imply that the presumptive Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, might not have had the backbone to do the same. This is the Obama team at its partisan worst. When we all should be glad that a master terrorist reaped the consequences of his evil actions, we are treated instead to a glorified image of the current president interwoven into his reelection campaign:
What, in fact, did he do that anyone else in his position would not have done? As Romney quipped, even Jimmy Carter would have made the same call. There’s also no credit being given to all the groundwork that was laid by the Bush administration that led to the raid. In particular, Obama and his allies have decried the enhanced interrogation techniques that effectively provided the information necessary to make the “takeout” possible. Then there’s the SEAL Team itself, which is largely forgotten in the reelection bid. No, this is all about Obama. What’s devastating is that SEAL members are speaking out, miffed over the grandiose role being promoted for the president. One cartoonist, Michael Ramirez, has displayed his feelings about Obama’s role rather blatantly:
Obama made the right decision, but his decision was not the most courageous on that day. He was simply doing what was necessary after all the spadework had been done for him. It was the soldiers who put their lives on the line to accomplish the mission. There was a hierarchy of courage in the events that transpired one year ago today.