Earlier I suggested that Captain Richard Phillips might have rescued President Obama rather than the other way around.
That's what I asked in my post "About That Heroic Rescue."
Now, along comes Ross Colvin of Reuters with a snap analysis that seems to agree with me:
The successful U.S. rescue of a cargo ship captain held by Somali pirates on Sunday has also saved President Barack Obama from a foreign policy problem he neither needed nor wanted:
- The Obama administration was careful not to give the crisis too much prominence while delicate negotiations were under way to secure the captain's release. Until the very end Obama himself made no comment to try to play down the standoff in the face of other foreign policy challenges from North Korea to Iran to Afghanistan and beyond.
- Obama escaped the political embarrassment that President Bill Clinton suffered in 1993 when 18 U.S. soldiers were killed in Somalia trying to track down warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed in a disastrous battle that led to the book and movie "Blackhawk Down."
- Had the standoff turned out otherwise it might have dented Obama's national security credentials and given critics, especially opposition Republicans, ammunition to portray him as weak on security and tackling terrorism. The outcome allows him to project himself as tough on security.
- It was not immediately clear how involved Obama was in the rescue operation but his statement afterward suggested he believed Washington must play a more robust role in dealing with pirates.
- Given that the present strategy of flooding the area with warships has enjoyed only limited success, it remains to be seen what Obama plans to do.
- Ground operations against pirates' hideouts remain a possibility, although that could put at risk the 270 hostages from around the world being held by pirates preying on the busy sea-lanes of the Gulf of Aden and the Indian Ocean.
- A more activist policy also has risks, possibly sucking the United States back into Somalia, which Foreign Policy magazine has called "The Most Dangerous Place in the World."
1 comment:
Again, I see the point, but it's a stretch. No one as of right now has any clue as to what to do about the pirate problem.
Obviously, any politician would like for American citizens to live through disasters. I'm just not sure that anyone could have made a convincing argument whose premise was that Obama was in any way responsible. Obama's actions were entirely correct even if the situation had turned out badly.
And any GOP outcry over pirates would hopefully have been met with the same question posed about the budget: what's your plan?
This kind of thing is exactly what makes me abhor politicians. If you've noticed, Obama has not come out gloating over the success. Nor should he. But, as I am curerntly delving into the Lebanon fiasco in your suggested book about Reagan, I am a bit more aware of the consequences of acting without consensus, or worse, acting because it looks good.
Leave this as Reagan would have wanted it to be; a story about an American hero, unclouded by the politics surrounding it.
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