Cool Hand Barack By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: May 3, 2011
No wonder the president’s top generals call him “a Cool Hand Luke.”
After giving the order for members of a Navy Seals team to execute a fantastically daring plan to, let’s be honest, execute Osama bin Laden, Barack Obama put on a tuxedo and gave a comedy speech Saturday night in a Washington ballroom of tippling journalists and Hollywood stars.
If we could have seen everything unfolding in real time, it would have had the same dramatic effect as the intercutting in the president’s favorite movie, “The Godfather,” when Michael Corleone calmly acts as godfather at his nephew’s baptism at church, even as his lieutenants carry out the gory hits he has ordered on rival mobsters.
Just substitute “Leave the copter, take the corpse” for “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.”-snip-
But there can be no doubt that
justice for the families of the 9/11 victims was agonizingly delayed because the Bush team took a megalomaniacal detour to Baghdad. A pigheaded Donald Rumsfeld, overly obsessed with a light footprint, didn’t have the forces needed at Tora Bora to capture Osama after the invasion of Afghanistan. To justify the switch to Saddam and the redeployment of troops to Iraq, W. and his circle stopped mentioning Osama’s name and downplayed his importance. When the White House ceases to concentrate on something, so does the C.I.A.
The hunt got so cold by 2005 that the Bin Laden unit at the C.I.A. was disbanded and overhauled. Four years after the monster felled the twin towers, the Bush team finally put more officers on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
In his East Room address Sunday night,
President Obama made it clear that he had shooed away the distracting Oedipal ghosts.
“Shortly after taking office,” he said, “I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the C.I.A., to make the killing or capture of Bin Laden the top priority of our war against Al Qaeda.”http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/04/opinion/04dowd.html 
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