Ronald Reagan wanted Qaddafi. He did not get him. Bush wanted Bin Laden and he did not get him. This is because they did not have the instinctive military genius of President Obama. The president knew that victory went to the side that had superior military technology and he used that advantage. He deployed highly trained boots on the ground Navy Seals to terminate Bin Laden and he used drones and our eye in the sky without need for a boots on the ground operation to topple Qaddafi. In both cases the mission was a success. And oh yes, he had a back up helicopter ready in the Bin Laden attack. Always have a Plan B which was lacking in the failed Iran hostage rescue mission decades earlier.
President Obama is right to choose Abraham Lincoln as his mentor. Without Lincoln there would be no United States today. The Confederacy would have survived the war in at the very least a stalemate. Lincoln pressured his generals to act, even going into the field to push them to the limits to defeat the Confederate Army. Lincoln studied and understood military strategy and tactics more so than some of his generals. It wasn’t until Generals Grant and Sherman arrived on the scene that he could let his generals take charge on their own for the most part with just his oversight.
It will be years before we know more about the classified missions that led to the deaths of Bin Laden and Qaddafi but we can surmise that President Obama acted like Lincoln when commanding the military resources at his disposal giving the nation confidence that he will be able to withdraw us successfully from Iraq and Afghanistan. Victory is within his grasp and he is the only person that can achieve that end based upon what we have seen so far from his opponents.
Kudos should also go to the president’s team of rivals especially Secretary of State Hillary Clinton who proved that she had the guts to make a difficult call when it came time to throw our support behind the rebels in Libya. Like Lincoln Obama had his own team of rivals and they acted with much the same success as Lincoln’s team did during the Civil War.
Our struggle is far from over but many Americans can go to sleep with the knowledge that their commander in chief is on the job and watching out for our interests around the clock making sure that our enemies have no time to rest as we hunt them down wherever they may be.