Why Obama is Quiet About Al-Awlaki

Michael Tomasky asks, "Why doesn't President Obama take more credit for killing the al-Qaeda leadership?"

Tomasky is normally a tough-minded observer of all points of the political compass, but on this occasion he has sunk much too deep into liberal self-regard.

Imagine if the Bush administration had killed bin Laden, under circumstances as daring as the ones under which he actually was put on ice by the Obama administration. Imagine what that week would have been like. On Fox News, we’d have been subjected to endless Soviet-style encomia to our heroic leader. What would the administration itself have done? I’ll concede the 10 or 15 percent chance they’d have surprised us and played it humbly. But in all likelihood, Bush and Cheney and Rummy and Condi would have dashed around the country making speeches at martial events, alternated (of course) with bathetic public ceremonies in the presence of some of the very 9/11 widows whom the Bushies, in other moments, aspersed for wanting things like an honest commission investigation into how 9/11 happened in the first place.

Obama didn’t do it. He held the press conference the night it happened. He quietly and tastefully—and wordlessly—laid a wreath at Ground Zero. He did give one speech, in Kentucky, but even that speech had very little of the gladiatorial sparkle of Bush’s infamous “Mission Accomplished” orgy. Obama met with members of SEAL Team Six, but he did so privately, and the White House released few details of the meeting. More generally, the Obama administration has decimated al Qaeda in Iraq and Pakistan over the last three years. All the high-profile killings make news of course, and sometimes big news, but I can’t shake the feeling that if the Bush team had managed all these high-profile killings, Americans would be more familiar with the litany.

There are two differences, I think, between liberals and conservatives when it comes to this sort of thing. The first is that the Democrats still believe that there are a few things that shouldn’t be politicized, while Karl Rove and his crowd thought absolutely everything should be. But there’s a more enduring difference than that. It’s about America’s role in the world and how it should exercise its power, and it goes back to the Cold War. Liberal Cold Warriors considered the dirty work of foreign policy a sad but unavoidable burden that history had placed on America’s shoulders. Conservative Cold Warriors as a group were more gung-ho and had no patience for that sort of temporizing.

In other words, Obama does not take credit because he's a noble Humphey Bogart character, throwing away his cigarette after a last silent puff under the lampshade, walking existentially into the glimmering dark, a lonely man on a lonely road...

Oh please!

President Obama is more than eager to demand credit when he feels credit is due.

If the president does not talk much about the al Qaeda operations, it is not out of existentialist resignation but because he and his team deeply believe that their supreme foreign policy imperative is to avoid giving offense to public opinion in the Islamic world. They fear that crowing over al Qaeda killings will alienate that opinion and make their job harder.

They keep quiet for the same reason that they make speeches in Cairo that acknowledge the Muslim but not the Jewish religious claim to Jerusalem, that they press Israel on settlements, and that they welcome dubious characters to White House Eid al-Fitr dinners. Their counter-terrorism strategy subordinates the use of force to the wooing of hearts and minds in the Middle East. They avoid boasting about their successes for much the same reason that George W. Bush avoided disobliging comments about Pakistan and Saudi Arabia: because it would inconvenience a strategy that Americans might not like very much if they ever got to understand it in full.

Obama's strategy like Bush's may or may not have its merits. But his silences like Bush's emerge from that strategy - and from a very different place than the liberal self-abnegation self-congratulated by Michael Tomasky.