Substituting Special Operations for Drone Strikes — in the Capture of al-Qaeda Leader Abu Anas al-Liby in Libya — and the Attempted Capture or Execution of al-Shabaab Leader Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr in Somalia — May Indicate the President’s Temporary and Perhaps Cynical Retreat from His Drone Murder Policy — during a Time when the 2013 Government Shutdown Has the Spotlight Aimed at Him

07 October 2013

An informative example of how historical currents can subtly manipulate presidential politics

This essay points out that domestic politics appear to have temporarily modified President Obama’s drone murder policy. Demonstrating (again) that it is not what is right that most immediately influences him, but what is politically convenient in the short run.

Two uncharacteristic decisions on the President’s part — special forces operations, rather than drone attacks, against two terrorist leaders

From NBC News:

U.S. commandos launched daring twin raids in Libya and Somalia on Saturday, capturing a senior al Qaeda official who allegedly planned 1998 embassy attacks in Kenya and Tanzania, the Pentagon said.

Anas al Libi, whose real name is Nazih Abdul-Hamed Nabih al-Ruqai'I, was seized in the Libyan capital, Tripoli, the Pentagon said. He has been wanted for more than a decade by the U.S. and has a $5 million reward on his head.

Relatives of al Libi told The Associated Press he was seized by gunmen in a three-car convoy while he was parking his car outside his house.

In discussing the raid in Barawe, Somalia, sources initially declined to identify the target of the operation but later acknowledged that the U.S. forces were looking for the leader of al Shabaab, Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr, also known as Ahmed Godane, but did not capture him. There were conflicting reports on whether any al Shabaab leaders were killed in the operation.

These risk-filled Special Ops interventions are significant because they run philosophically counter to the President’s oft-expounded belief that drone strikes save American lives.

So why change the drone murder priority now?

Enter domestic politics — and the President’s concern about how his leadership legacy is perceived in the future

Looking backward, it increasingly looks as if President Obama is going to be remembered for ObamaCare and his remarkable expansion of George W. Bush’s imperial presidency. The latter has come under increasing attack from thoughtful Democrats. And the former makes the Republican Party see red.

Consequently, if the President is to have any favorably perceived legacy at all, he has to protect ObamaCare.

How the President’s legacy and the current political situation are playing themselves out

You will recall that the in-progress federal shutdown began with Republicans’ unaccomplishable determination to defund ObamaCare. Rather than yield to law and the Supreme Court, these Neo-Confederate anti-patriots decided to shut the government down.

Today, the House fools that started it all are trying to blame President Obama for not reopening selected parts of the government — so as to aid them in looking slightly less operationally idiotic than they actually have been.

The political maneuvering — which revolves around who is to blame and who is not — means that the President has be concerned about selling his “no negotiations with Republican extortionists” policy to the public, without simultaneously looking so uncompromising as to flip accountability onto himself.

In this dance, it is a safe bet that a decade down the road — if really bad things happen to the United States as a result of the shutdown and (possibly) a debt limit fiasco — it will be remembered as being the President’s fault, simply because our commanders in chiefs’ names are easier to remember than those belonging to malicious narcissists like Senator Ted Cruz and his cross-Congress fellow cretins in the House.

Consequently, when we got news of the two risk-filled US military special operations over the weekend — employed under circumstances in which drones would ordinarily have been used to exterminate the two high ranking terrorist adversaries — I concluded that the President had decided not to further strain his often ambivalent “progressive” support by continuing down the Drone Murder Highway that he so often likes to drive.

The gist of the President’s purported logic

When “your guys” increasingly don’t like half your legacy, you had best diminish their ability to remember those negatives and recast their focus on what they think you did well.

Meaning that President Obama may have decided to go after Anas al Libi and Mukhtar Abu Zubeyr with Special Operations personnel, rather than drones, simply because it is (arguably) easier to defend the morality of the former mechanism.

Snatching a bad guy, face to face, out of car ethically beats dropping a missile on his house, which may have other people in it.

Special Ops also has the global opinion advantage of allowing our enemies to fight back. It is easy to call a drone murder-favoring nation cowardly for fighting from afar. It is more difficult when its emissary elite are in front of you, kicking your (hopefully recognized) faces in for the crimes you’ve committed.

Here, I am intentionally putting the most favorable ethical face on Special Operations. In fact, Special Ops in foreign (at peace) lands has some of the same legal and moral objections that drone murder policy does. Since those are irrelevant to what the President is probably thinking, I’ll leave them aside.

The moral? — If you want to influence policy, you have to find what the Commander in Chief cares about and then maneuver him (or her) into a corner that exposes that vulnerability

Ironically, the extremist Republican faction in the House of Representatives may have temporarily forced a change in a foreign policy they approved of (drone death), by acting like fanatic nihilists about a domestic law they didn’t like.

The only way to (bitterly) enjoy democratic America’s demise is to notice the self-inflicted, psychologically twisted nuances of our fall.

PeteFree.com