When President Obama announced the death of Osama Bin Laden to the nation Sunday night, he referenced himself more than 25 times during the speech. At the same time, he referenced the U.S. military only 3 or 4 times.
It was almost as if he really believed credit was due him for cornering and killing Bin Laden, but the obvious truth is that the military personnel he scorned in that speech, the very ones that he has scorned throughout his days on the national stage, deserve the credit. And they deserve it not only for killing Bin Laden, but for doing so despite the many obstacles Obama has thrown up along the way.
The cold hard truth is that Obama has done all he can, to date, to hinder our success in the War on Terror “Overseas Contingency Operation.”
Perhaps a few simple examples will suffice to make my point:
In 2007, when the troop surge that turned everything around in Iraq was being promoted by President Bush, then-Senator Obama opposed it, and arrogantly asserted: “We can send 15,000 more troops, 20,000 more troops, 30,000 more troops, [but] I don’t know any expert on the region or any military officer that I’ve spoken to privately that believes that that is going to make a substantial difference.”
Despite Obama, the surge was implemented and the surge worked.
Around the same time, Obama opposed funding the troops because he wanted President Bush to set a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq but Bush refused. (In other words, Obama was willing to withhold funds to the point of hurting our troops unless he got his way.)
On the presidential campaign trail, Obama promised to close Guantanamo Bay, end military tribunals, and ban the enhanced interrogations techniques that some of our troops had used on terrorists, and which Obama believed violated human rights.
For the record, I always found it strange that members of our military, a.k.a., the good guys, were supposedly violating human rights by “placing hoods or sacks over [terrorists’] heads, [placing] duct tape over their eyes, [or subjecting] them to total sensory deprivation,” while the terrorists, a.k.a., the bad guys, were to be handled with kid gloves although they had a penchant for decapitating and otherwise mutilating the bodies of captured U.S. personnel.
Nonetheless, just months after Obama was sworn into office in 2009, he further tied the hands of our military (and intelligence communities) by requiring that “Miranda rights [be read] to high value detainees captured and held at U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan.”
These Obama-era policies are so harmful to our military that it seems fair to ask whom Obama is really at war with? Especially when we add the attacks he leveled at our military tribunal system by trying to move the most high profile terror trial on record – that of “professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his four co-conspirators” – from military hands to civilian courts in New York City where everyone would be guaranteed the chance to lawyer up and plea bargain (and to use the subsequent media coverage as an opportunity to propagate “anti-U.S. and anti-Semitic rants that would have served as a rallying cry to Islamists everywhere”).
Of course there are others things Obama has done to hinder our military or damage its morale, but the constraints of this post don’t allow them all to be to be covered here.
Suffice it to say Obama’s speech about the death of Bin Laden should have contained 3 or 4 references to himself, at most, and 25-plus references to our brave military personnel, at a minimum.
For not only did they kill Bin Laden, they overcame Obama to do it.
Big Peace
