Days after Barack Obama won the presidential election in 2008, his soon-to-be chief of staff Rahm Emanuel made news with a comment at the Wall Street Journal’s conference of corporate chief executives during the throes of the financial crisis.
Widely misquoted and paraphrased, the quote was: “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.”
Now, this line can certainly be left up to interpretation. Emanuel went on to add: “And what I mean by that, it’s an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.”
Emanuel’s quote can be contextually debated, but is generally understood to mean that opportunities can arise for a political party during crisis incidents. Obama certainly successfully leveraged the exposure via nonstop coverage of Hurricane Sandy in October of 2012, a month before his re-election campaign resulted in a thorough drubbing of Republican candidate Mitt Romney.
And Republicans have been accused of manipulating the circumstances surrounding the attack on Sept. 11, 2012, by Islamic militant group Ansar al-Sharia terrorists, on two lightly protected U.S. diplomatic compounds in Benghazi, Libya.
The Republican-led Benghazi probe on Capitol Hill dragged on for years. Detractors claimed it was a cynical political stunt designed to cripple the presidential aspirations of Hillary Clinton. She headed the State Department during the brazen attack that left four Americans dead, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens.
At play in the probe championed by one side of the aisle, the party in power at the time, was a “stand down” order related to responding military support.
Years of congressional hearings and testimony failed to move the needle of public opinion. If you went into the debate feeling the Obama White House failed our diplomats, you remained entrenched there. If you initially viewed the probe as a “political witch hunt,” there you remain.
And so goes the investigation into the tragic death of four brave members of a Special Forces team in Niger on Oct. 4, 2017. With a different commander in chief in place, it appears the partisan sides have switched positions.
The political Right, typically staunch supporters of the military and its missions, view this as a tragic and unavoidable consequence of a deployed Special Forces team conducting one of its sworn missions, Foreign Internal Defense. These operations entail the training of military police units from allied nations. It is a dangerous business. These teams often work on hostile terrain and seek to target terrorist activity within the host nation. Their lifeline (combat support units) can be hours away, in friendly neighboring countries.
With the recent release of drone footage that captures the recovery of a team member’s remains and a summary of a classified and criticism-laden 6,000-word report that chronicles details surrounding the ambush, the political Left has been “reinvigorated.” It is now time to further exploit the tragedy and question the “why” of the mission.
No need to get bogged down in the particulars, like the fact that it was then-President Barack Obama who ordered the troops there in 2013 to assist the French military who were engaged with al Qaeda affiliated terror groups in the bordering country of Mali.
And of course no partisan critique from the political Left would be complete without the cynical employment of the race card. At question, why did it take some 48 hours after the intense firefight to recover the remains of an African-American soldier, Sgt. La David Johnson?
The implication here, of course, is that the U.S. military, under President Trump, simply doesn’t treat its minority members the same way they would their Caucasian ones.
Disgraceful.
As a former Ranger-qualified U.S. Army infantry officer who served as an FBI attachment to the Joint Special Operations Command in the early stages of the war in Afghanistan, I find these charges so baseless, reckless, and disgusting that they should not even be addressed.
Just like within the law enforcement community I served in for a quarter-century, the military community doesn’t see color the way some in America do. After all, the U.S. military was integrated in 1948, via then-President Harry Truman’s Executive Order 9981. This occurred some 16 years before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed.
The assertion that dedicated Green Berets left behind one of their own, just because he was black, makes my blood boil.
The fact that some may infer a “racial calculus” in the efforts to extricate Johnson’s body is laughable. But some of the usual suspects get away with making their unfounded claims and adding their slimy conjecture that damns by inference.
Rep. Frederica Wilson, D-Fla., has certainly taken Rahm Emanuel’s crisis recommendation to heart. She eavesdropped on Trump’s call to Johnson’s grieving widow, and then blasted him in the media by claiming that he clumsily advised that her husband “knew what he signed up for.”
Last October, she also posited this offensive question while on CNN’s “New Day”: “I thought you were supposed to put your comrade across your shoulder and get on the helicopter with the dead and the wounded. Why did they leave him?”
Wilson is suddenly supremely interested in the military mission planning that attends Special Forces operational maneuvers in foreign lands. Her sudden newfound interest is seemingly rooted in her skewed social justice worldview that sees “racism” and “inequality” behind every rock in America and now, also in West Africa.
The similarities in the attacks in Libya and Niger are plentiful. Both involved committed attackers with Islamist terror group affiliations and resulted in the deaths of four brave Americans.
Each may also ultimately have been avoidable, as well. The military’s deep dive into the Niger attack described an “inaccurate mission plan,” and criticizes the mission creep that may have resulted in unauthorized kill/capture missions for a team ill-equipped for those particular missions.
These criticisms are fair.
But please, keep the cynical political opportunism at bay. You excoriated the GOP’s assertions about Obama administration intentions and commitment to our troops. So, please display some self-awareness. Understand that your offensive assertions about “selectivity,” related to how the Green Berets fight to the death to leave behind none of their own on the battlefield, are so repugnant as to be beyond the pale.
With apologies to Rahm Emanuel, sometimes it’s in the country’s best interests to allow a serious crisis to go to waste.
James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) worked in the FBI for 25 years. He is a law enforcement analyst for CNN and an adjunct assistant professor in homeland security and criminal justice at St. John’s University.
