2012 U.S. Presidential Election

[PanzerJaeger]

I seem to recall specials ops gone wrong having some impact in the past. Perhaps you're right and now would be different.

It would be very different. The Carter Administration, being the Carter Administration, announced the failure of the mission to the world on the night that it happened and detailed pretty much the entire affair. The Iranians were not even sure what was going on until they read the administration's statement, which caused them to split the hostages up - making future rescue missions nearly impossible. These days, SOCOM raids on HVTs in the AfPak region are quite common and the military has developed a public relations architecture to deal with any eventuality, which is essentially silence followed by denial followed by outright lies. And maybe long after any potential story has died in the news cycle, some relevant half truths are dumped on a Friday afternoon before a holiday. This can be done because pretty much everyone in these missions is SOCOM or absorbed into SOCOM before they go, which did not exist in its current form in the '70's. Carter used lots of regular forces and there is, or was (the military keeps plenty of stuff they do hidden these days too), a perceived duty to be more transparent about their circumstances.

And my personal favorite, which appears to be addressed directly to Sasaki and Panzer: "So the Republican position on the operation that took out Osama bin Laden is that it was no big deal? Good luck with that one."

Bah. The backroom is searchable now. Go look at the thread I started about the killing of OBL. I made it clear that it was a big deal and gave the president plenty of credit for doing it - and I still do. I simply take issue with the notion that it was a particularly tough decision that only a president with Obama's resolve () could have made. Any president would have loved to get the man. As Romney said yesterday, 'even Jimmy Carter would have made that call.'