Last week President Obama responded to his Republican critics who say he is the 21st century’s version of Neville Chamberlain. “Ask Osama bin Laden and the 22 other out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement,” the President said during a news conference.
GOP presidential candidate Rick Santorum regularly lobs the inane “appeasement” charge at Obama. “At every single turn the president has appeased those who would do us harm,” the former Pennsylvania senator said on Sunday. So naturally, Santorum probably isn’t convinced that Obama even had anything to do with killing bin Laden and he said so last night on CNN (as he has before), calling the president’s comment last week “pathetic”:
SANTORUM: Osama bin Laden was a continuation of President Bush’s policy. It had nothing to do with a contingency or a problem that came up on his watch. He simply followed through, which we have been trying to do for 10 years.
KING: Deserves no credit for that?
SANTORUM: Any more — no, the people who deserve credit for that were the military whose mission it was to find them. And the president doesn’t deserve credit for doing — he didn’t make a decision, if you will, as to go after bin Laden. That decision had been made 10 years ago.
Santorum eventually relented after host John King noted that Obama “gave the go-ahead” to raid bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. “I do give him credit for that,” Santorum said. Watch the clip:
President Bush himself tried to sneak this narrative by the press too but the reality is that Obama nabbed bin Laden in spite of the former president’s policies, not because of them.
The conservative claim that Bush is the one responsible for the bin Laden raid “couldn’t be further from the truth,” the National Journal’s Michael Hirsch wrote in May. “Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader…lies a profound discontinuity between administrations — a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists,” from Bush’s bombastic and overly expansive “war on terror,” to Obama’s “covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.”
“Shortly after I got into office,” Obama said in an interview after bin Laden’s death, “I brought [then-CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, ‘We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission.’”
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