Yoda and the Politics of Killing OBL

As this Star Wars Day (May the 4th be with you) winds down, it is appropriate to remember the signature commentary of the Jedi sage Yoda: “Do or do not; there is no ‘try.’” 

I am pleased to say I heard a variation on this theme a few weeks ago when my Dean told me he was recommending me for promotion. He said some very nice things about my work, and, as is my wont, I stumbled in accepting praise. I mumbled something like “I try.” I doubt that I’ll ever forget his response: “Lots of people try; you succeed.” 

Whether I deserved to be thus described isn’t the point. Rather, what happens in the real world and what happens in a George Lucas movie are alike in at least this respect: for things that matter, results are always more important than effort. I don’t want to listen to a violinist who strives mightily to play that concerto, to put in a placekicker who will take his best shot at kicking the game-winning field goal, or to entrust my life to a surgeon who does his best to remove that tumor. No, work ethic goes only so far. Success trumps effort, ten times out of ten. 

There is a place for honest failure. All of us, even, possibly especially, the most accomplished, fail frequently. Indeed, the scale of one’s failures is often a determinant of one’s true worth. The violinist, the placekicker and the surgeon mentioned in the previous paragraph all know defeat. But they are skilled enough, confident enough, bold enough to attempt what others dare not. There is honor in that. Striving for greatness and coming up short is better than settling for mediocrity. But it doesn’t beat accomplishment. Do or do not. 

I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon in relationship to the recent assassination of Osama bin Laden, specifically as it relates to the frenzied attempts by right-wing talking heads to try to claim that the (failed, criminal, unconstitutional) policies of the Bush administration were largely if not principally responsible for the success of the mission. To be fair, while most of the leading Republicans who actually hold elected office (Boehner, Cantor, even Rand Paul) cited Bush administration efforts to capture or kill bin Laden, they also expressed thanks to President Obama and his administration. 

Is this, as Representative Barney Frank suggests, “politicizing” the event? Sure, it is. But any sensible person sees the touch of desperation for what it is and moves on. Of course, the real leadership of GOP—Limbaugh, Palin, Cheney, Rove, everybody at Fox News—sees President Obama’s administration as simply a vessel for the culmination of Bush-developed intelligence, rather like the ancient Greeks regarded the mother’s role in procreation as merely a receptacle for the seed of the true parent, the father. For this gaggle of zealots, it could only have been Bush-era policies which won the day. And when, initially, it appeared that water-boarding may have played a role in leading to a key early lead in determining OBL’s location, the loonies became downright giddy, crowing about how their torture techniques had paid real dividends. 

Subsequent reports, including a statement by Bush era Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, denied these reports, only to have them re-surface today when current CIA Chief Leon Panetta acknowledged that part of the “mosaic” (to use Attorney General Holder’s term) that ultimately led to locating Osama bin Laden appears to have been achieved through torture. So we have a proponent of waterboarding, who ought to be in a position to know, denying its efficacy (in this case, at least), and an opponent of waterboarding, who also ought to be in a position to know, asserting precisely that efficacy (again, in this particular instance). 

Jay Carney’s claim that “we don’t know” whether a particular piece of information was vital evidence  achieved through waterboarding may be the first time in a generation that a presidential press secretary has told the absolute truth. What is clear is that 1). some useful information may have been gleaned using “enhanced interrogation” and 2). there’s no direct line from whatever information was thus gathered to this week’s raid, or that mission would have taken place months if not years ago. 

None of the above, of course, changes whether torture—and waterboarding is torture, far from the “moral imperative” that Rep. Peter King would have us believe—is a good idea. It is not. No pragmatic argument overcomes the legal and ethical barriers, as Jack Marshall, among others, has pointed out. There are, to be sure, some philosophical issues raised by the raid. Is it ever legitimate to send troops into a sovereign country, uninvited, to conduct a vigilante mission, even against the world’s poster boy for terrorism? Can information obtained by torture ever form the evidentiary foundation for such an operation? What was the effect—legal, ethical, or pragmatic—of bypassing the Pakistani government? But while these are legitimate concerns, they are topics for another day and/or another commentator. What concerns me right now is the wisdom of Yoda. Do or do not. 

I made the point last time that President Obama deserves “a modicum” of the credit for this operation. Most of the success is attributable to intelligence operatives, military strategists, and of course to the SEALs who carried out the mission. But just as the quarterback gets too much of the credit for a win and too much of the blame for a loss, so is a Commander-in-Chief’s effectiveness often measured by the success of operations over which he has little direct influence. Barack Obama wasn’t responsible for the successful raid on OBL’s compound, any more than Jimmy Carter was to blame for the failure of the rescue mission in Iraq in 1980. 

But—and here is where Peter King is actually right (write this down; it doesn’t happen very often)—presidencies are often defined by whether such missions work or not. It isn’t fair, but it is the way of the world. So what matters in these terms is quite simple: what was the result? It is clear that the many moments when President Bush downplayed the search for OBL were simultaneously sour grapes and a legitimate and truthful description of geopolitical reality: “concentrating on one man really indicates… that people don’t understand the scope of the mission” is no doubt true. 

But you can’t convince me that the Bush administration wouldn’t have strutted more than a little (as indeed they did, not altogether inappropriately, with respect to Saddam Hussein) had they succeeded in bringing bin Laden to ground. There are, in other words, lots of reasons why Bush ought to be excused or reasonable arguments that Obama simply got lucky. No argument here. But Yoda’s scorebook looks like this:

Obama did. Bush did not. There is no “try.”

Abbottabad and the Miracle on Ice

The announcement of the killing of Osama bin Laden was one of the first galvanizing events of the post-Facebook age. As such, it generated an immediate response from a lot of my FB friends: from multiple Wizard of Oz references (“Ding Dong, the witch is dead”) to gags about Donald Trump’s demanding a death certificate (“and it better not be from Hawaii”) to musings on Fox News’s spin (“Obama Admits to Murder of Elderly Homeless Man”). There was also a snarky rhetorical question about whether any pro-life people were out celebrating.

Other responses were more philosophical, shying away from the gloating that characterized some people’s reactions: is celebrating a death, anyone’s death, a really good thing to do? There were quotations attributed to Mark Twain (“I've never wished a man dead, but I've read some obituaries with great pleasure.” —probably actually a slightly misquoted line from Clarence Darrow) and to Martin Luther King, Jr. (“Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” —this much, at least, seems actually to have been Rev. King, although there was a tag at the beginning that wasn't), and at least one Biblical citation (“Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and do not let your heart be glad when he stumbles; lest the Lord see it, and it displease Him.” Proverbs 24:17-18).

But the two Facebook posts that struck me were a wish that “it didn’t look so much like a sports rally” and a prediction of the certainty of Barack Obama’s re-election. Let’s start with the latter notion. While there are those who will no doubt try to make a case that Obama earned another term on the basis of a single military mission, it’s a shaky argument at best. True, President Obama deserves a modicum of credit, if that is the word, for what transpired in Abbottabad. If nothing else, he remained true to his campaign promise (one which was mocked by John McCain) to send American troops into a sovereign country—specifically, Pakistan—in pursuit of a known terrorist if the local government was “unwilling or unable” to do the job.

Whether this decision is ethically or legally defensible is an issue for another day: what matters in terms of this discussion is that it worked, at least until and unless there is a remarkable backlash from the Pakistanis. But Mr. Obama didn’t develop the intelligence-gathering apparatus, didn’t put the pieces together, didn’t plan the raid. He was simply smart enough to employ people with the skills to fulfill those functions. Should that keep Mr. Obama in the White House for another term? Nope. Will it? No, again, although it could help.

But I don’t think so. For one thing, in purely political terms, the operation was mis-timed. In fact, failure often works better than success as a re-election strategy. Just ask the Bushes: GHWB had 90+% popularity immediately after winning the first Gulf War, and was promptly defeated by Bill Clinton a little over 20 months later when other issues had time to become paramount. His son, however, accomplished little in the Afghan or Iraq Wars, but managed to win the 2004 election based largely on fear-mongering and a desire not to change leadership while at war. (N.B.: I am emphatically not suggesting that President George W. Bush intentionally dragged out the war as an election ploy.) We’re still a year and a half from November 2012: plenty of time for the electorate to forget this incident if the Republicans are in the position to run their own “it’s the economy, stupid” candidate.

But, more importantly, there was that enormous outpouring of quasi-patriotic emotion last night: at the White House, at Ground Zero, indeed all over the country, crowds of largely young people—those who were in grade school on 9/11—gathered to bellow off-key renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner, to embrace strangers, and to chant the now-familiar “U-S-A! U-S-A! U-S-A!”. Indeed, the observation of my FB friend who described a “sports rally” was especially apt.

I understand the impulse. If I’d still lived in the city of my doctoral alma mater, I’d have been part of the crowd of thousands who gathered downtown when the basketball team won the NCAA title three years ago. Our side had won a game, and it didn’t matter that nothing had really changed. Had a certain jump shot clanged off the rim with 1.9 seconds left in that game instead of hitting nothing but net, the team would have been no less skilled… but we won, and that was cause for celebration.

And, indeed, nothing has really changed in the last day or two: Osama bin Laden was little more than a figure-head, long since distanced from real operational leadership of al Qaeda. No one with any political sophistication thinks this one event will truly be a game-changer: it won’t change appropriations bills, bring the troops home any faster, or have any significant effect on global terrorism. True, there will be a considerable symbolic value that plays out for some time, and threat levels will likely be a little higher in the short term and a little lower in the longer term. But I don’t see anything of major significance. In geo-political terms, this is all good news for the US, but, frankly, the fall of Hosni Mubarak will resonate considerably louder and longer—or at least it will if we play our cards right.

And yet, there were those spontaneous demonstrations: seemingly authentic patriotic expressions that seemed over the top for all their unquestioned sincerity. Indeed, I was reminded not of the celebration of some generic sports victory, but of a specific incident in sports history: not of Kansas beating Memphis in basketball in 2008 or of New Orleans beating Indianapolis in football in 2010, but of the response to the semi-final win of the US Olympic hockey team over the seemingly invincible Soviets in 1980. That was the game that gave us heroes named Jim Craig and Mike Eruzione, one of the most memorable sports broadcasting moments ever (Al Michaels’s “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”), and the crystallization of the hitherto all-but-unknown “U-S-A!” chant.

I was living in a small town in Kentucky at the time, and if I wasn’t the only person in the area who had ever actually seen a hockey game, I was pretty damned close. But within minutes of the end of the game, there were dozens of vehicles cruising around the town square to the accompaniment of blaring car horns and the now-ubiquitous “U-S-A!”. In a town of only a few thousand residents, even counting the college students, there were scores of screaming people in the streets. True, that “Miracle on Ice” victory in Lake Placid was a significant athletic achievement, but the response was mind-blowing, especially since the overwhelming majority of the celebrants didn’t know a blue line from a poke-check.

It was the disproportionality of the excitement that caught my attention last night, as well. And that is where President Obama needs to take the right lesson away from the evening’s events. When people who knew nothing about the sport took to the streets to celebrate a hockey victory in 1980, it was because we needed some positive news, because we craved a reason to celebrate, well, anything, and a hockey game happened to be handy. At the time, the so-called “misery index” (inflation rate plus unemployment rate) hovered above 20% (by way of comparison, it’s under 12% now); the American Embassy in Teheran had been overrun three months earlier, resulting in dozens of US citizens being held hostage; the present looked bleak and the future bleaker. An outlet, any outlet, that let us feel good about ourselves was to be treasured.

We’re there again. The impetus for celebration existed last night, just as it did that February night in 1980, the last previous time I can recall when people all over the country celebrated and no one was unhappy (as would happen in a national election, for example, where tens of millions of people didn’t like the fact that Bush or Obama or whoever else was elected). But neither a semi-final hockey game nor the death of a single terrorist—even the biggest bogeyman in the pantheon of Bad Guys—is really a sufficient catalyst for the public response they engendered. That’s what ought to have Mr. Obama worried: the disproportionality. Because while getting a lot of praise for a military mission you endorsed is a good thing, people getting this excited over a newsworthy but ultimately tangential event isn’t. Mr. Obama would do well not to over-estimate his achievement just because the crowd did… because their excitement may well be driven as much by desperation as by patriotism.