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Charles Krauthammer points out the bin Laden raid was a result of Bush’s war on terror.
…The bin Laden operation is the perfect vindication of the war on terror. It was made possible precisely by the vast, warlike infrastructure that the Bush administration created post-9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda and made bin Laden a fugitive.
Without all of this, the bin Laden operation could never have happened. Whence came the intelligence that led to Abbottabad? Many places, including from secret prisons in Romania and Poland; from terrorists seized and kidnapped, then subjected to interrogations, sometimes “harsh” or “enhanced”; from Gitmo detainees; from a huge bureaucratic apparatus of surveillance and eavesdropping. In other words, from a Global War on Terror infrastructure that critics, including Barack Obama himself, deplored as a tragic detour from American rectitude.
…Now, it is one thing to have an argument about whether it’s over. It’s quite another to claim that our reaching this happy day — during which we can even be debating whether victory has been achieved — has nothing to do with the war on terror of the previous decade. Al-Qaeda is not subsiding on its own. It is not retiring from the field, having seen the error of its ways. It is not disappearing because of some inexorable law of history or nature. It is in retreat because of the terrible defeats it suffered once America decided to take up arms against it, a campaign (once) known as the war on terror.
In the NYPost, Michael Walsh wonders if this might be the end of jihad for awhile.
…Millenarian sects tend to falter when their confidently apocalyptic predictions fail to materialize. Now that bin Laden sleeps with the fishes — the perfect end to a jumped-up gangster — it is highly likely that his version of jihad will die with him.
Unlike the British, we’ve never had the slightest desire to occupy Muslim countries. If Muslims want to come here and accept the American way of life (which means, obviously, no jihad and no sharia), fine.
From her earliest days, America — the vision of freedom — has threatened kings and emperors and popes and potentates and pashas and Mahdis. But every one that tried to crush us failed. …
Daniel Henninger, in the WSJ points out while Obama is dancing on Osama’s grave, his attorney general is threatening to indict CIA interrogators.
As the whole of America takes a bin Laden victory lap, let us pause to remember some of this celebrated event’s most forgotten men: the Central Intelligence Agency officers who sit under the cloud of a criminal investigation begun in 2009 by Attorney General Eric Holder into their interrogations of captured terrorists.
That’s right, the Americans whose interrogation of al Qaeda operatives may have put in motion the death of this mass murderer may themselves face prosecution by the country they were trying to protect.
…On June 18 last year, Mr. Holder said in a Washington speech that Mr. Durham was “close to the end of the time that he needs and will be making recommendations to me.” But nothing has happened. Asked this week about the status of this investigation, a Justice Department spokesman for Mr. Durham, whose office is in Connecticut, said the project is “still ongoing.”
Ironically, the CIA’s contribution to bin Laden’s end may ensure that its people will remain under this cloud. With President Obama elated over the success of his call to take down bin Laden, his poll numbers rising and his re-election campaign insulated from charges of Democratic softness on national security, what are the chances that his attorney general would wash away all that by announcing his intention to indict the men whose work may have sent his boss into Abbottabad, guns blazing? It is zero. …
Victor Davis Hanson looks at Obama’s previous criticisms of Bush policies that Obama has continued.
…In sum, Senator Obama opposed tribunals, renditions, Guantanamo, preventive detention, Predator-drone attacks, the Iraq War, wiretaps, and intercepts — before President Obama either continued or expanded nearly all of them, in addition to embracing targeted assassinations, new body scanning and patdowns at airports, and a third preemptive war against an oil-exporting Arab Muslim nation — this one including NATO efforts to kill the Qaddafi family. The only thing more surreal than Barack Obama’s radical transformation is the sudden approval of it by the once hysterical Left. In Animal Farm and 1984 fashion, the world we knew in 2006 has simply been airbrushed away.
Times change. People say one thing when they are candidates for public office, quite another as officeholders with responsibility of governance. Obama as president naturally does not wish to be treated in the manner in which he once treated President Bush. Conservatives might resent Obama’s prior demagoguery at a critical period in our national security, as much as they are relieved that he seems to have grown up and repudiated it.
Okay, the public perhaps understands all that hypocrisy as the stuff of presidential politics. But I think it will not quite accept the next step of taking full credit in hyperbolic first-person fashion for operations that would have been impossible had his own views prevailed.
In the Daily Beast, Douglas Schoen thinks that Obama can increase his poll numbers by showing leadership on economic issues.
…President Obama received no immediate approval bump from the bin Laden kill, according to the new Newsweek/Daily Beast poll, though the subsequent days may have produced a smallish increase. The Gallup poll released on Thursday shows a six-point increase in Obama’s job approval, and the Real Clear Politics average shows a four-point bounce in Obama’s job approval rating.
…To be sure, the president garners justifiably high ratings for leadership generally and specifically on the war on terror, as 55 percent say Obama is a strong leader overall and over 60 percent see him as a leader in the War on Terror. But implications of this for the 2012 election are clear. The fact that the president got just a modest bounce in his job approval and saw no fundamental change in his overall ratings, even while six in 10 say they are more likely to vote for him because of bin Laden’s killing, indicates the profound disquiet American voters feel with current economic circumstances.
…The Newsweek/Daily Beast poll shows that the Republicans are largely discredited. Paul Ryan’s budget plan and the GOP leadership in the House are highly unpopular. Given that the GOP field has yet to take shape and Donald Trump is completely discredited, the president has the opportunity to take advantage of the enormous amount of goodwill that has been generated by this event to fill the void that has been left by the Republicans. …
Joel Kotkin reports on cities with the most jobs, for Forbes.
…no place displayed more vibrancy than Texas. The Lone Star State dominated the three size categories, with the No. 1 mid-sized city, El Paso (No. 3 overall, up 22 places from last year) and No.1 large metropolitan area Austin (No. 6 overall), joining Killeen-Temple-Fort Hood (the No. 1 small city) atop their respective lists.
Texas also produced three other of the top 10 smallest regions, including energy-dominated No. 4 Midland, which gained 41 places overall, and No. 10 Odessa, whose economy jumped a remarkable 57 places. It also added two other mid-size cities to its belt: No. 2 Corpus Christi and No. 4 McAllen-Edinburgh-Mission.
Whatever they are drinking in Texas, other states may want to imbibe. California–which boasted zero regions in the top 150–is a prime example. Indeed, a group of California officials, led by Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom, recently trekked to the Lone Star State to learn possible lessons about what drives job creation. Gov. Jerry Brown and others in California’s hierarchy may not be ready to listen, despite the fact that the city Brown formerly ran, Oakland, ranked absolute last, No. 65, among the big metros in our survey, two places behind perennial also-ran No. 63 Detroit-Livonia-Dearborn, Mich. …
In Tech News Daily, we see speculations about the stealth helicopter downed in the bin Laden raid.
…Photos of the tail-end of the aircraft circulated online shortly after the raid suggests it was a secret stealth helicopter — possibly a highly modified version of an H-60 Blackhawk — that was designed to fly quietly and to evade radar, experts say.
…Cenciotti noted that NASA is also known to be using motion-control technology to reduce Blackhawk noise, and the strange tail cover on the downed copter could conceivably have been used to house such technology.
…”The noise made by this helicopter compared to a conventional helicopter probably reduced the reaction time of all the personnel protecting bin Laden.”…
In Ricochet, we learn about war dogs. Rob Long’s piece starts with a wild photo and then tells us why they didn’t send a cat on the mission to Abbottabad.
…On the FP website, Rebecca Frankel does a series called “War Dogs” and each one is an amazing testament to why dogs are awesome and why cats are pointless:
…So it should come as no surprise that among the 79 commandos involved in Operation Neptune Spear that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s killing, there was one dog – the elite of the four-legged variety. And though the dog in question remains an enigma — another mysterious detail of the still-unfolding narrative of that historic mission — there should be little reason to speculate about why there was a dog involved: Man’s best friend is a pretty fearsome warrior.
…in the debate of Dog v. Cat, case closed. Dogs are fierce warriors, loyal friends, hard chargers, face lickers, snack lovers, and, clearly, patriots.
They didn’t bring a cat to kill Bin Laden.