Among all the wrong things President Trump said amid his attack on Admiral Bill McRaven, he was right about one thing: The U.S. mismanaged elements of the mission to capture or kill al Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden.
Trump’s attack on McRaven was wrong and wrongheaded. A retired four-star admiral and Navy SEAL who held just about every position in the U.S. special warfare organization, McRaven is a proven patriot of the finest order. On that basis alone it was wrong for Trump to suggest, as he did to Fox News’ Chris Wallace on Sunday, that McRaven is a partisan with an agenda. It was equally wrong for Trump to blame McRaven for the delays that led to the bin Laden operation. Here we see the worst edges of Trump’s personality: his willingness to deride the character of great Americans simply because they have criticized him.
Yet Trump’s other bin Laden raid contentions stand on more solid ground.
Yes, Bill Clinton missed his shot.
Consider the tweet:
Of course we should have captured Osama Bin Laden long before we did. I pointed him out in my book just BEFORE the attack on the World Trade Center. President Clinton famously missed his shot. We paid Pakistan Billions of Dollars & they never told us he was living there. Fools!..
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 19, 2018
I will admit I haven’t read Trump’s book to see if one could divine a plan of how to capture bin Laden. But Trump is certainly correct that Clinton “missed his shot” to get bin Laden. Clinton faced at least two very good opportunities to do so and failed. And while Clinton did face countermanding concerns related to civilian (and in one case, foreign dignitary) casualties, by the summer of 1998, al Qaeda’s threat was abundantly clear. Clinton should have authorized military action.
No, Bush and Obama could not have gotten bin Laden “long before” 2011.
The story gets murkier at the strategic level.
Trump is incorrect in suggesting that former Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush should have captured bin Laden “long before” 2011. For one, Trump’s natural implication here is that he would have caught bin Laden more quickly. I sincerely doubt that. After all, the breakthrough that led to bin Laden’s capture was in identifying and locating the terrorist leader’s primary courier. In turn, that helped develop an intelligence trail that led to bin Laden’s safe house in Abbottabad, Pakistan. It is not clear how Trump could have sped up this timeline.
But Obama could have moved on bin Laden earlier.
That said, Obama cannot escape total blame here. There is a very good case to be made that Obama waited too long to authorize the bin Laden raid. We can make that claim based on multiple reports that suggest the CIA had a high-confidence assessment by the end of September 2010 that bin Laden resided at the Abbottabad safe house. So why did it take until the beginning of May 2011 for the strike operation to be launched?
And we know a large part of the answer: because befitting his approach to many covert actions, Obama was unsure about whether to authorize at all. It was only when the CIA relentlessly reiterated confidence in bin Laden’s presence that Obama finally acted. Still, that gap of eight months between September 2010 and May 2011 is a lifetime in intelligence terms. Had bin Laden pursued his earlier modus operandi, moving between locations multiple times a week, he might have escaped. The simple point here is that while Obama deserves credit for eventually authorizing what was a very risky mission, he risked bin Laden’s escape by waiting so long to do so. Obama’s hesitation in authorizing these kind of actions, especially with early operations against ISIS, was the norm. This hesitancy infuriated some U.S. officials.
Put simply, as with many issues, Trump is half-right here and half-wrong.
