Times Square: Good Luck or Good Policy?

Conservatives are criticizing the Obama Administration for being "lucky" that the Times Square Bomber was a dud. In reality, luck is an essential part of war.

Although there is marked disagreement on how to deal with terrorist suspects in custody (cue split screen of Eric Holder/Rudy Giuliani) a consensus has gelled that we were “lucky” that the Times Square bomb failed to detonate, just as we were lucky in the incompetence of the Christmas “underwear bomber.”

Some in the GOP see this apparent good fortune as a possible line of attack against the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism policy: "Yes, we have been lucky," House Minority Leader John A. Boehner said Thursday, "but luck is not an effective strategy for fighting terrorism."  Conservative blogger Alan Caruba put it more bluntly: “Apparently, the Obama administration’s anti-terrorism policy can be summed up in two words, ‘Get lucky.’”

The GOP and conservatives as a whole ought to tread lightly here.  In any war, luck plays an enormous role and to discount damn fortune is to betray ignorance of how we have scored some of our most important military victories (or staved off sure defeat) in the past.  Being lucky is not necessarily a sign of poor strategy or failed leadership.  Sometimes good luck is a bonus by-product of sound strategy.

But exactly how much was the failure of this latest bombing attempt due to luck and not policy?  Could not the stunning incompetence demonstrated first by the so-called underwear bomber and now the Times Square dud be due to the possibility that Al Qaeda is in disarray? As predator drone strikes pummel their leadership from above and U.S. boots on the ground chase them on their own turf, they are thwarted in maintaining a coherent and unmolested organization necessary to pull off such sophisticated plots that laid waste to lower Manhattan a decade ago.

If Republicans feel the need to score points against Obama over this latest failed terror attempt, perhaps they should remind voters that candidate Obama’s rhetoric notwithstanding, President Obama seems to have very much followed the Bush model of fighting them there so they cannot harm us here.  From increasing troop strength in Afghanistan to sending armed drones off on missions of assassination and mayhem on a daily basis, Obama is acting very much the warhawk that his base thought they’d sent packing in 2008.  I once wrote defending Bush’s approach to terrorism and offered that his motto might be distilled to “if you only knew what we knew.”  Now Obama knows too.  His knee-jerk closing of Gitmo and early Apologia Americana tours seem a distant memory.  And the predators are now on the prowl with a vengeance.

But here comes the ugly reality: no anti-terror protocols are full-proof, no matter how diligent.  Thus it really is just a matter of time before a motivated suicide bomber detonates himself in our midst and innocent Americans die on our city streets. Instead of trying to score self-serving talking points, the political discourse would be better served by our leaders being responsible and preparing us for this eventuality.  And if the GOP is not careful, it may even appear that we are rooting for a successful attack to lend merit to an anti-Obama “I told you so.”  This is a terrible charge and I certainly do not believe this to be true.  But truth and public perception are not always the same.

There are legitimate policy debates to be had regarding the administration’s approach to domestic terrorism.  Ridiculing the impact of something so universal in the human condition as luck—especially when luck may not be as big a factor in Faisal's failures as first perceived—is an approach that will achieve nothing but perhaps paint us as petty, partisan and maybe even worse.