Funny, as I check my calendar, this was about the same time in Barack Obama's first term that SEAL Team Six bagged Osama Bin Laden. Coincidence? Even though he is not nor will he ever be one, is The One starting to feel like a...lame duck?
This is apparently to be the antidote:
U.S. Special Operations forces killed a senior ISIS commander during a raid intended to capture him in eastern Syria overnight Friday to Saturday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter said.
The ISIS commander, Abu Sayyaf, fought capture and was killed in the raid in al-Amr, he said in a statement.
Carter said he had ordered the raid at the direction of President Barack Obama. All the U.S. troops involved returned safely.
“Abu Sayyaf was involved in ISIS’s military operations and helped direct the terrorist organization’s illicit oil, gas, and financial operations as well,” he said.
His wife, an Iraqi named Umm Sayyaf, was captured and is currently in military detention in Iraq, National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said in a statement.
On the one hand, if this report is correct, the White House directly ordered this caper, which is to O's credit. And had it gone horribly, horribly wrong, there could have been a lot of American casualties, which wouldn't have set well with his lunatic base (not that this will sit will with his lunatic base at all, but that would have been even worse), so that is an honest-to-goodness incursion of some degree of actual risk for an ostensibly American military objective. Never let it be said that I don't dispense kudos to the enemy when they're warranted.
But while Abu Sayyaf's treasure trove of intel is a nice haul and will do serious damage to ISIS, at least in the short term, he's not the true Big Fish. Capturing or killing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi would have been a bigger splash and PR coup and distraction, especially given the Left's idiotic "capture one man, win the war" mindset. One doesn't have to imagine the penis-stroking Address To The Nation victory lap/endzone celebration that would have ensued from that coup.
But then, even al-Baghdadi isn't bin Laden. And his majesty didn't grab al-Baghdadi, but a top lieutenant who is an important score, to be sure, but of little political value to him.
Still, the real high-fives go, as usual, to U.S. Special Forces, who, even though they're political pawns and have to know it, are still getting the job done for their country and civilization against the savages seeking to lay waste to it, and are seventeen different shades of awesome.
<salute>
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