President Barack Obama deserves praise for taking out Osama bin Laden. Politically, it may not have been as difficult a choice as President George W. Bush’s surge in Iraq, which he undertook in the face of congressional and even military opposition. Yet it took courage for Obama to order the mission–especially given the additional risk of sending in special forces rather than bombing bin Laden’s hideout. I’m glad Obama didn’t fail.
It’s reassuring to know that despite his often confused–and dangerously weak–foreign policy, Obama rose to the occasion as commander-in-chief. Yes, it was absurd for him to worry about bin Laden’s burial rites. But at least the dithering was about how to dispose of bin Laden’s corpse, not whether it was right to kill him. Sen. John McCain (R-AZ)’s 2008 slogan still rings true: Obama’s “not ready to lead.” Yet at least he’s able to execute.
Americans are united in victory, as we celebrate the achievement of our armed forces. We’re also united in humility, as we face the uncomfortable political realities of the post-bin Laden world. To channel McCain again: it’s better to lose an argument than to lose a war. And Democrats and Republicans have each lost an important argument en route to success in the long quest to vanquish America’s most hateful and elusive enemy.
Democrats in general, and the left in particular, have lost the policy argument over how to pursue the war against terror. Obama has embraced, however reluctantly, almost all of the Bush terror policies he once railed against. He has kept the Guantánamo prison open. He has continued wiretapping, renditions, and military commissions. He even started another war–without the explicit congressional authority that Bush had in Iraq.
The irony of Obama’s reversal is that he would not have won the Democratic nomination except as the anti-war alternative. And Democrats and the mainstream media have allowed Obama to get away with it. That is evidence of their hypocrisy–but also, perhaps, of an increasing maturity, a recognition that, as George Orwell wrote in 1942: “To survive you often have to fight, and to fight you have to dirty yourself. War is evil, and it is often the lesser evil.”
Republicans in general, and some presidential hopefuls in particular, have lost the political argument about Obama’s legitimacy. It’s no longer possible to indulge the destructive idea, as some did, that he is hostile to the country. As Bret Stephens notes in today’s Wall Street Journal: “If every there was a doubt about just how American Mr. Obama is, Sunday’s raid eliminates it better than any long-form birth certificate.”
Those doubts were not based on Obama’s race or birth, except in a few marginal and notorious cases. They arose from sincere–and still urgent–concerns about Obama’s appeasement of America’s enemies, his attempt to substitute a statist “social compact” for our Constitution, and his resort to class warfare in budget debates. Obama’s policies and politics remain a direct challenge to our individual liberty and national harmony.
Yet it’s those policies and politics that ought to be at the heart of American political debate–not Obama’s pedigree. True, the 2012 election is going to be “all about Obama”–but it’s going to be about Obama’s record as president, not as student or infant (however interesting those records may be as biography). Obama’s success in eliminating Al Qaeda’s leader surely means that he has earned the benefit of the doubt from Republicans, at least on the question of his motivations.
Finally, President Obama himself has lost one argument, even as he won another. In the 2008 campaign, he insisted on the importance of hunting down bin Laden, even if it meant working around the Pakistani government. Even some conservatives reluctantly acknowledged that Obama had the right idea. But as McCain observed in their first debate, “Obama doesn’t understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy.”
For Obama, the focus on bin Laden served as a rhetorical tool, a way of criticizing the war in Iraq and Bush’s freedom agenda while sounding tough on national security. But it never was a strategy in itself–and bin Laden’s death won’t solve the mess in Libya, the brutality in Syria, or the threat of Iran. Al Qaeda is not our only enemy, and Obama’s failure to acknowledge that until now has led the U.S. into deep strategic incoherence.
The killing of bin Laden does not take foreign policy “off the table” for the 2012 election–nor should it. But it does offer hope that foreign policy debates will be less paranoid than they have been in recent years. Conservatives have been right about policy in the war on terror. Liberals have been right about Obama’s devotion to duty. With the humility to accept each other’s sincerity, let’s have the robust debate America needs and deserves.
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