Politics
Election 2012: Obama – Marking bin Laden death isn’t ‘celebration’
President Barack Obama gave a steely defense of his handling of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden and his use of it to burnish his re-election credentials a year later, saying Monday that it is appropriate to mark an anniversary that Republicans charge is being turned into a campaign bumper sticker.
He then jumped at the chance to portray presumed Republican presidential challenger Mitt Romney as unprepared to make the kind of hard call required to send U.S. forces on that highly risky mission. Without mentioning Romney by name, Obama recommended looking at people’s previous statements on the manhunt for the 9/11 mastermind.
Obama’s re-election team has seized on a quote from Romney in 2007, when he said it was not worth moving heaven and earth to go after one person. On Monday, Romney said he “of course” would have ordered bin Laden killed, but his campaign criticized Obama for turning the successful death raid to political gain.
“I assume that people meant what they said when they said it,” Obama said at a White House news conference. “That’s been at least my practice. I said that I’d go after bin Laden if we had a clear shot at him, and I did. If there are others who have said one thing and now suggest they’d do something else, then I’d go ahead and let them explain it.”
Obama is using the May 2 anniversary to help maximize a political narrative that portrays him as bold and decisive. Romney has sought to cast Obama as weak and too quick to compromise on other foreign policy matters, including Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Obama and his national security team will be featured in an NBC prime-time special Wednesday night that reconstructs the operation from inside the White House Situation Room. White House counterterrorism chief John Brennan discussed Obama’s command of the raid on a Sunday talk show and in a speech Monday.
“The death of bin Laden was our most strategic blow yet against al-Qaida,” Brennan said at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington.
