Tag Archives: Desert One

POTUS makes courageous call in authorizing raid

October 27, 2019 kanelis2012

It must be said — and I’ll say it here — that Donald John Trump made a gutsy call in authorizing the raid that killed Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi somewhere in Syria overnight.

Commanders in chief on occasion face life-and-death decisions that given all the moving parts of highly complicated military operations can result in tragedy.

The president’s authorization of a mission to send Delta Force soldiers and CIA commandos into Syria to kill the Islamic State leader was one of those nail-biters.

Barack Obama faced a similar situation in 2011 when he made the call to send in SEALs and CIA agents to kill Osama bin Laden. The president knew then that that the operation was based on what he called a “55-45 probability” that bin Laden was actually in the compound where they ended up killing him. He was. The mission succeeded famously and the nation cheered its outcome.

So it should be with the al-Baghdadi raid.

I get that presidents don’t shoulder weapons themselves, or pull the trigger, or fly aircraft into harm’s way. The responsibility of success o failure rests solely on their shoulders.

Thus, when they make these decisions they must face the possibility of tragic consequences if one of those many moving parts falls apart. When they do, the mission can fail. Think of the Desert One Iranian hostage rescue mission that ended tragically in 1980 and think, too, of the terrible burden that President Jimmy Carter likely carries to this very day.

President John F. Kennedy said famously after the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba that “victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” He took the failure heat all by himself.

The al-Baghdadi raid was a huge success. The capability of our military special forces is unparalleled in all of human history. The Delta Force team served the nation and the world well. To that end, the president who sent the soldiers on this perilous mission deserves credit for making a courageous call.

He has eliminated an example of, um, “human scum.”

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Five years ago, the war on terror shifted

May 3, 2016 kanelis2012

Five years ago, my wife and I were watching TV.

Then we noticed one of those crawls scrolling across the bottom of the screen. It announced that President Obama was going to make a special announcement about a national security issue.

It was a Sunday night. The president never goes on national TV to tell us something about national security unless it was something really, really huge.

I turned to my wife and said, “I think they got bin Laden.” Yes, I said that. You can ask her if you wish.

It was right around midnight when Barack Obama strode to a microphone in the White House to say that U.S. Special Forces had carried out a mission that killed Osama bin Laden.

The forces took bin Laden’s body to an aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean, where sailors aboard the U.S.S. Carl Vinson “buried him at sea.” I prefer to think they just tossed his corpse into the drink.

Americans cheered. I cheered, too. We all were glad to see the 9/11 mastermind and head of al-Qaeda pay the price for his dastardly history.

Of course, in the days and weeks that followed, Obama’s critics all said much the same thing. The president was taking “too much credit” for issuing the order to take out bin Laden. Big deal, those critics said. He didn’t board the helicopters, fly into Pakistan with no lights at night. All he did was issue the order.

I felt compelled at the time — on May 2, 2011 — to remind those critics that another president once ordered a rescue mission into Iran. It was April 1980 when U.S. Army Special Forces ventured to Desert One and where several of them died in the futile attempt to extract those U.S. hostages from the clutches of the Iranian “students” who captured them at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran.

Did President Carter deserve the “blame” for the mission failure? Sure he did. He ordered it, apparently without agreeing to plans for how to deal with the mechanical failures that resulted in the desert tragedy.

Having said that, President Obama deserved “credit” for ordering the hit job that brought down the world’s most notorious terrorist.

Did the death of one man spell the end of the fight? Not in the least.

It redefined the nature of the fight. It made it possible for the current president to rely on finely tuned intelligence gathering to help our forces bring justice to the monsters who seek to do us harm.

http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/02/politics/obama-terror-doctrine-bin-laden-raid/index.html

Was the bin Laden raid a lead-pipe cinch to succeed? No on that one, too. The president was concerned that the Navy SEAL team and the Army Special Forces pilots would come up empty when they landed in the compound where they believed bin Laden had been “hiding in plain sight.”

The mission proved to be a success.

The fight against international terrorism goes on. I, though, am willing to give the commander in chief for exhibiting a huge measure of courage in issuing the order that brought about a national cheer.

Believe this, too: Had it gone wrong, President Obama surely would have gotten the blame.

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Was the Carter presidency a failure?

August 23, 2015 kanelis2012 1 Comment

Former presidents aren’t immune from criticism, even when they’re struggling against what might be a terminal illness.

Just ask Jimmy Carter.

Setting that aside, it’s been said many times — usually by Republican politicians — that President Carter’s four years in the White House constituted a “failed presidency.”

Interesting. Let’s look briefly at the record.

Yes, the economy tanked badly during Carter’s term. Why? One reason was the huge spike in oil prices. Lending institutions panicked. They jacked up interest rates way beyond what was normal or acceptable. Inflation took hold. Was all of that the president’s fault? Hardly. But it happened on his watch, so I guess he deserves some of the blame.

The president did a poor job of assuring Americans that they would be all right. He spoke glumly to us, although he never used the word “malaise.”

Foreign policy? Let’s see.

He negotiated a peace treaty in 1979 between ancient enemies Israel and Egypt. He turned them into allies. He took Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat to Camp David, clunked their heads together and got them to sign the most important Middle East peace accord in, well, the history of the region. It has held firm to this day.

He helped negotiate a treaty that handed over the Panama Canal to the Panamanians. Imagine that: giving to a nation cut in half by a U.S.-built canal territory that belonged rightfully to its people.

The president signed a treaty with the Soviet Union that helped reduce the number of nuclear weapons in both nations’ arsenals.

Were there missteps? Sure. He didn’t handle the Mariel boatlift of Cuban refugees well. He acknowledged just recently that is one of the regrets of his presidency.

Now, the big one: the Iranian hostage crisis. Fifty-two Americans were taken captive in Tehran in November 1979. The Islamic revolution had overthrown the shah and those “students” were angry because the shah had gotten medical attention in the United States. Was that the president’s fault?

Was it his fault that the mission to rescue the hostages in April 1980 ended tragically in the desert? Just as Barack Obama’s critics have said he took too much credit for the successful mission in May 2011 to kill Osama bin Laden, Jimmy Carter took too much blame for the failure of the Desert One mission to bring our hostages home.

Let us remember, too, that they came home safely on Ronald Reagan’s first day in office. The Iranians clearly wanted to stick it to President Carter by waiting until he no longer was president to end the crisis.

Was it a troubled presidency? Certainly. A failed one? In my view, no.

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Carter demonstrates — again — his class and grace

August 23, 2015 kanelis2012

First of all, let me stipulate — as if it’s needed — that I am praying for President Jimmy Carter’s full recovery from cancer.

None of us beyond the former president and his immediate family knows what the doctors told him when they revealed that he had cancer — and that it had spread to his brain.

But to watch the 39th president tell the world about his diagnosis was to get a hint — I believe — in a prognosis that doesn’t appear very hopeful.

“It’s in God’s hands now,’’ he said. My belief is that when someone invokes God, well … you know what I mean.

His absolute devotion to his deep Christian faith brings hope that he truly is at peace with whatever awaits him. The president told us all that he is ready for whatever outcome awaits him. And watching this man for nearly 40 years from afar, but getting a feel for his deeply held religious faith, you get the sense that he really and truly is at peace.

As many have noted, Jimmy Carter’s post-presidency has been far greater than the single term he served in the White House.

Someone asked him this week in Atlanta when he made his stark announcement about any regrets he had about his presidency.

He said he wishes he’d sent “one more helicopter” into the Iranian desert in April 1980 on that tragic mission to rescue the American hostages held captive by Iranian militants. Had he done that, Carter said, the mission likely would have succeeded and he would have been re-elected to a second term.

The reporters gathered in the room to record the event laughed.

President Carter smiled that broad, toothy grin we’ve all come to know.

He remains an optimist that he’ll win this battle. I’m hoping, too, that his inner strength will carry him forward to do more good work.

Peace be with you, Mr. President.

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What if the bin Laden mission had failed?

March 19, 2015 kanelis2012

You hear this on occasion from conservative critics of President Obama.

The president “had nothing to do” with the killing of 9/11 terror attack mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly repeated the preposterous notion this week on an edition of his “O’Reilly Factor” talk show.

http://mediamatters.org/video/2015/03/18/oreilly-obama-had-nothing-to-do-with-the-killin/202957

I’ve heard it from others on the right, many of them right here in the Texas Panhandle, where the president is about as popular as … oh, let’s see, bin Laden.

O’Reilly said the Navy SEALs had everything to do with killing bin Laden in May 2011. Well, yes they did. The brave men risked everything by flying into Pakistan on a moonless night, landing their helicopters in bin Laden’s compound, looking for bin Laden, finding him, killing him and then hauling his corpse out of there.

However, to say that a commander in chief who issues the order “had nothing to do” with its success ignores the truth of what would have happened had the mission failed.

Did President Carter have “nothing to do” with the mission to rescue the Iran hostages in April 1980, the one that failed, costing eight American lives in the middle of the desert? He wasn’t at the controls of any of the helicopters that crashed. But he certainly got the blame — chiefly from those on the right — for the mission’s failure.

Did President Truman have “nothing to do” with ending World War II when he issued the order to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki? What if the Enola Gay B-29 bomber had crashed on its flight over Japan? Give ‘Em Hell Harry would have caught plenty of hell himself.

This ridiculous notion that presidents don’t risk enormous political capital when they make these difficult decisions is the stuff of nonsense.

Barack Obama had to weigh the risks of sending in the commandoes when he ordered the hit on bin Laden. He could have ordered air strikes that could have killed innocent civilians. He didn’t. He could have passed, deciding the risk was too great. He didn’t do that, either.

The president did what presidents get paid to do. He made the difficult call.

Thus, he, too, had everything to do with the success of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden.

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