Don't Politicize the Failed Yemen Raid by Andrew Exum, The Atlantic
The United States lost a Navy SEAL this past week in a raid in Yemen that went wrong. In addition to the loss of the SEAL and a $75 million aircraft, it also appears that several innocent civilian lives were lost—never a good thing, and even worse when one of those innocent civilians appears to have been an 8-year-old girl.
Unnamed military officials told Reuters that “Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support, or adequate backup preparations.”
I was born a few years after the end of the Vietnam War, but never in my own memory has the political opposition to the sitting president been this intense. No president in my lifetime has become so unpopular, so fast. Yes, there was a lot of domestic opposition to President Bush, which culminated in the 2006 midterms, and yes, Republicans in the Obama years used a wave of Tea Party resentment to obstruct the president’s agenda, but this really and truly is something different. I was catching up with a friend in Congress, a Democrat, earlier this week, and he described the anger of his base as something he had never seen before.
So take a deep breath, because I’m about to tell many of you something you do not want to hear: Blaming Trump for what happened is both inappropriate and counterproductive. There are some good reasons to disapprove of this president: He is a man of demonstrated low character whose first few weeks in office have weakened both the international alliances and American values that have preserved our preeminent place in the world for over a century. Keep your powder dry for those things—but not this.
This raid, according to The New York Times, was approved by and recommended to the president by his secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For the recommendation to have gone forward to the president, the senior leadership of the Department of Defense would have signed off on this operation. And for that to have happened, special operations and regional U.S. commanders would have had to have blessed the planning that went into the operation itself.
The left cannot on the one hand claim Donald Trump is ignorant of military and security affairs, and then on the other hand expect him to second-guess the professional recommendations of his uniformed and civilian military leadership…
Comments
THIS answers exactly what I critiqued Exum's comments on....
WHO pushed this operation and why the haste...when before the Obama NSC showed clear reluctance........
NOW it is apparent it came from DoD/CENTCOM levels...question who called them from the Flynn controlled NSC to "suggest it"....
DoD on Yemen raid:"after January 20th...that’s when we sought the authority & received the authority for proceeding”
http://www.salon.com/2017/02/03/former-obama-official-deadly-yemen-raid…
SO again who was responsible for the poor planning...poor intel and why the sudden and urgent haste...JSOC...CENCTOM...DoD or the Flynn NSC....???
And the WH blame game after a highly successful raid...just continues onward and upward.....
Spicer flat out lied that Obama team had ok'd Yemen mission. @ColinKahl was at the meeting and that was not discussed.
What Team Trump has not fully yet understood when it happens on your watch...it is your responsibility...you own it....
THIS is what actually happened and it goes back to my original question...WHY the haste to push this particular raid WHEN apparently even the Obama WH was uncertain and hesitated....
Colin Kahl,Obama NSC adviser says his team ran thorough process not to do Yemen.Trump took over& did not run a thorough process
WHY did then DoD/CENTCOM decide evidently on their own to push it forward if in fact the NSC was hesitating in the past...
WHAT did NSC see that evidently DoD/CENTCOM did not see and or did not want to see?
Maybe the regional and political fallout far outweighed the effects of the raid....
which is now fully and completely apparent.....
So while Excum writes in one direction.... CENTCOM cannot avoid some very serious questions over this major failed raid....
Namely..why the rush to judgement???? AND was that rush pushed by the WH NSC......namely Flynn...???
If we are to believe the narrative issued by both the WH and CENTCOM that this JSOC raid was designed to capture "intelligence" of some value...BUT WAIT...the actual JSOC targeting cycle that the new natsec Flynn thoroughly understand ALWAYS generates "intelligence" as the JSOC targeting cycle lives and dies on intel driven operations.....intel gained from previous raids of from IC....
So what was so important this time around that CENTCOM had to produce a really low level example of this so called "gained intel" to prove as the WH claims...the raid was "successful"....
Therein lies a very serious question that CENTCOM is dodging....
Walking into an evidently long term planned ambush and taking the losses in manpower and aircraft does not appear at first glance to be as the WH stated...a "success".
Secondly there was a short notice made that three AQ were killed..so if they were the targets when why the silence on who they were?
Or and this is what is important was the civilian death rate far higher and closer to the Yemeni statements of roughly 50 plus including women and children....
This raid with the total narrative confusion and the WH Muslim travel ban has placed AQ and IS back in the running again narrative wise....
Question is..was it worth it?
This is why it is urgent to understand this failure.....
QUOTE
Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, as the branch is known, had collected enough intelligence to anticipate the raid last weekend, Yemeni officials and analysts said. The militants also had the firepower to counterattack from their bastion, which was surrounded by land mines and other traps.
How did they collect and what did they feed US intel sources to setup this ambush...which it was....a major ambush....
I would tend to accept Exum's comments since I have been tracking him long ago when he was working his PhD and then went into the common think tank world of CNAS...
BUT here is the super large BUT.....
BUT why then did CENCTOM attempt to cover up and post a AQ video...the CENTCOM video matches one video I downloaded during Iraq 2006/2007...
WHY was there an attempt by CENTCOM to allude that such a video was the "top grade quality intel" they recovered and that was the reason the WH claimed the raid a "success"....
That is not politicizing the issue.....that is asking a blunt question that truly needs to be answered and not by CENTCOM....
BTW..there was talk that ST6 took also computers BUT nothing was mentioned after the failed raid....
Core to this raid was failure....and Exum needs to get over it...and ask just why this appears to be the first time for such a major failure.....
There is back channel chatter that yes DoD pushed the raid forward to Trump but that chatter also says that the raid planning under Obama was doubtful at least thus the foot dragging.....and Exum knows this...
THEN why the rush to raid?...if the hesitancy to raid there had been there under Obama?
That question is both valid and blunt and needs to be answered......
I fully understand that sometimes a raid goes south but not by JSOC planning standards....unless that raid was pushed forward and rushed.....
Even I have flown into a preselected LZ that was in the middle of the fully manned NVA Regimental HQs......THAT no one even knew was there......and 11 hours later I walked out of that LZ..so yes I do know raid ops can indeed go south....
BUT we never did cover that one up...you learned from it and moved on....
Good points from Andrew Exum (especially the final paragraph excerpted below):
BEGIN QUOTE
So take a deep breath, because I’m about to tell many of you something you do not want to hear: Blaming Trump for what happened is both inappropriate and counterproductive. There are some good reasons to disapprove of this president: He is a man of demonstrated low character whose first few weeks in office have weakened both the international alliances and American values that have preserved our preeminent place in the world for over a century. Keep your powder dry for those things—but not this.
This raid, according to The New York Times, was approved by and recommended to the president by his secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For the recommendation to have gone forward to the president, the senior leadership of the Department of Defense would have signed off on this operation. And for that to have happened, special operations and regional U.S. commanders would have had to have blessed the planning that went into the operation itself.
The left cannot on the one hand claim Donald Trump is ignorant of military and security affairs, and then on the other hand expect him to second-guess the professional recommendations of his uniformed and civilian military leadership.
Americans have to allow those men and women to be aggressive, to take risks, and to, on occasion, fall short. And we cannot immediately blame the president if and when they do.
END QUOTE
Neither Obama or Trump should be "blamed" for this and this "debate" is unhelpful. It was absolutely wrong for Spicer to invoke the staffing process in the Obama administration to imply that since according to him the mission was approved so as to imply this was Obama's responsibility just as it is unhelpful to blame Trump. We are no longer in the campaign season and now is the time to lead and govern. It is Trump's responsibility as all that our nation does or fails to do lies at the feet of of our Commander in Chief and he had to make the ultimate decision. Perhaps his decision making process needs work, sure. But no intelligence on the objective will ever be perfect and the enemy always has a vote. But we have to nip this in the bud and stop politicizing every overseas military action or we are going to have some real problems down the road. And I am talking about both sides politicizing this operation. Please stop.