Opinion: OBL's Death a Victory for the Adults
Tue, 05/03/2011
By C. Edmund Wright
The children are celebrating and taking credit for the death of Osama bin Laden, but make no mistake about it, this is a win for the adults. This will give Obama a short-term boost in the polls, but I submit after a few days or weeks of liberal celebration, reality will start to sink in for more and more Americans.
Now by adults, I mean folks mature enough to understand that the world is a mean place ruled by the aggressive use of power and that the only way to stop evil from ruling is for the good guys to use more power and to use it more aggressively.
And by children, I mean the overgrown juveniles who refuse to understand this reality as it is and who like to think the Muslim world adored us until Bush-Cheney and Rumsfeld came to power. Long before election day of 2012, this will become evident.
Because when you drill down, the death of bin Laden has nothing to do with the core beliefs of this President or the entire liberal movement.
The death of bin Laden has nothing to do with closing Guantanamo Bay. It has nothing to do with trying Kahlid Sheik Muhummad in New York City. It has nothing to do with avoiding collateral damage at our own soldiers' peril and it has nothing to do with Patti Murray's gushing about bin Laden's day care centers.
We did not kill bin Laden by trying to understand why they hate us so much and we did not do it by allowing Jamie Gorelick to keep our CIA and FBI and Special Forces from talking to each other.
We did not do it because we allow gays in the military or because we set lower standards for certain groups so as not to hurt their self-esteem. We did not kill him because we unionized TSA agents thereby memorializing their right to grope us without fear of losing their jobs.
Killing bin Laden was not the result of Teddy Kennedy sanctimoniously railing against Abu Ghraib nor was it the result of Cindy Sheehan's hatred of George W. Bush. The protestations by liberals -- including John McCain -- against waterboarding and other forms of enhanced interrogation techniques had nothing to do with this either.
Code Pink was not involved, and this strike had nothing to do with Obama's doctrine of "courageous restraint." This operation did not involve the UN and it was not multi-lateral.
And for sure, the supposed worldwide peace and respect the mere election of Barack Obama was going to bring the United States had nothing to do with it either. In fact, as I add it up, there is not one single scintilla of liberal thought or policy that had anything to do with the successful operation by Seal Team Six.
In fact, under Obama's government shutdown program, Seal Team Six team members would not have been paid.
When you get right down to it, the successful taking out of bin Laden is a stunning defeat of everything childish about liberal foreign policy and national defense. That a liberal kid was in the White House when all of this happened reminds us of the cliché of the rich kid who "was born on third base but acts like he hit the triple." And make no mistake about it, with the repeated mention of the "I" word in the Sunday night address, Obama wants us all to think he virtually pulled the trigger.
So let's look at what really happened.
First, it is instructive that candidate Obama campaigned against the idea of even killing bin Laden. Now he's taking credit for masterminding the entire op and the military hating leftists are now ready to call him the return of Patton.
But let's look at some background. What really happened is that the intel trail that ultimately culminated in Sunday's events started in 2007 at Guantanamo Bay. The first key piece of intel was the identification of the couriers who kept bin Laden informed. I guess we'll never know for sure if waterboarding led to this first nugget of information, but you can bet that whatever it was it falls under the very adult notion of "enhanced interrogation" techniques. In other words, Obama is the beneficiary of tactics he campaigned against -- that were performed at a location he campaigned against.
The credit belongs the adults who put in place these interrogation techniques and who decided they would take place at Gitmo. That would be Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld. Three adults.
And this intelligence nugget led to a four-year chain of events that ended this past weekend with what must have been a real life Jason Bourne scene. But the guys who did this, the Joint Special Operations Command, have been operating in the Afghan-Pakistani theatre for ten years. Sunday night was merely the end result of ten years of hard and dangerous work started by -- the adults.
To sum it up, everything we as conservatives believe about our country's defense, the War on Terror, interrogation, special ops / black ops, Gitmo, and the realities of the world was validated. Our ideas won. Our tactics won. An enemy we never hesitated to call out was killed.
Everything liberals believe about the same was defeated. They are trying to take credit for a win in a war they never acknowledged with tactics they openly hate. With a childish liberal in the White House, that may not be evident to much of the country at the moment. But I predict it will be. Facts are facts. The adults won. The kids were along for the ride kicking and screaming. Americans' curiosity with how this all went down will bring this to light.