President Trump revealed Sunday that U.S. Special Operations forces finally eliminated Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the longtime leader of ISIS.
“He was a sick and depraved man,” the president said, without having to exaggerate. “And now he’s gone. Baghdadi was vicious and violent, and he died in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying. He died like a dog. He died like a coward. The world is now a much safer place.”
There are a lot of similarities between Baghdadi’s death and the 2011 raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Both Baghdadi and bin Laden were world-renowned terrorists who ordered or inspired the murder of many, many, many Americans. Both were on the run from the United States and international forces. Both met their ends eventually, cornered like cowards. One area where the two events differ, however, is in American news coverage.
To wit, U.S. news media went wild for former President Obama, heaping praise on him for his “gutsy call” of giving the bin Laden raid the go-ahead.
For Trump, the news coverage has been the exact opposite of what we saw in 2011. It has been both weirdly reverent of the slain ISIS leader and critical of the White House.
“Watching the raid was like a movie, the president said,” the New York Times reported in a headline. “Except, there was no live audio.” It reported elsewhere, paraphrasing anonymous intelligence officials, “Mr. al-Baghdadi’s death in the raid on Saturday, they said, occurred largely in spite of, and not because of, Mr. Trump’s actions.”
Funny enough, there have been no similar attempts by the newspaper to downplay the Obama team’s role in taking out bin Laden, even though then-Vice President Joe Biden opposed the raid.
On Face the Nation Sunday morning, CBS national security contributor and former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell complained that the language Trump used to announce Baghdadi’s death was disrespectful.
“You don’t want a locker-room kind of feel to this,” said Morell. “That was the one thing we worked really hard on after the bin Laden raid, is don’t make those kinds of statements, because it does inspire other people.”
Later the next day, CNN hosted contributor and former CIA Director James Clapper, who made the exact same argument that Trump’s public remarks made him “cringe.” Because using the proper amount of respect for bin Laden did such a bang-up job dissuading the rise of ISIS, right?
Then there are the weirdly reverent news headlines and reports.
“Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48,” read a shockingly tone-deaf, and short-lived, Washington Post headline.
If you can believe it, that was not even the first version of the headline. It read originally, “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, Islamic State’s ‘terrorist-in-chief,’ dies at 48.”
The paper’s communications general manager, Kristine Coratti Kelly, said of the “austere” headline that it “should never have read that way, and we changed it quickly.” She said elsewhere that the heavily criticized headline was “written in haste.” I am not sure how that makes any sense, considering that it was the second iteration of an already-published headline.
Bloomberg News went with: “Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi transformed himself from a little-known teacher of Koranic recitation into the self-proclaimed ruler of an entity that covered swaths of Syria and Iraq.”
So it is the Koranic recitation — not the sex slaves, decapitations, destruction of artifacts, burning of enemies alive — that we are to remember him by? This is akin to reporting on bin Laden’s death and leaving 9/11 until the lower paragraphs.
Then there are the commentators working a bit too hard to convince themselves that it’s not such a great thing for the White House, or even that there are downsides to Baghdadi’s death.
CNBC’s John Harwood argued that the White House would not see a bump in the polls because “in the American psyche, Baghdadi was to bin Laden as an ant is to an elephant.”
It’s worth noting that this sort of thinking got us ISIS — those in the know downplayed the threat of this “J.V.” terror group. Recall that Obama’s tan suit press briefing was the one where he admitted he had no plan to defeat ISIS.
“How killing Baghdadi affects the impeachment inquiry,” read a CNN headline this weekend that signaled a maybe a bit too much panic on the author’s part. The opening paragraph reads, “If you think something like the sensational killing by US Special Forces of the world’s most wanted terrorist is going to quiet calls for President Donald Trump’s impeachment, you are going to be sorely mistaken.”
We get it, guys. Trump cannot be allowed to have even one good day in office.
