Keyes: Mission To Kill Bin Laden May Have Been “Driven By Political Considerations”

After warning that President Obama was devising a scheme of using international forces to stay in power, Alan Keyes is now raising doubts about the successful operation to kill Osama bin Laden. Keyes likens the Obama administration to the Soviet Union, and claims that “back chatter” tells him that Obama and his advisers may have been opposed to the raid against bin Laden because of his “politically correct concerns about offending Islamic sensibilities” that made him “act the part of timid politicos.” But Keyes also maintains that Obama wanted bin Laden killed rather than capture him alive for more sinister, politically-motivated reasons:

Following the track of events in America’s governmental and political life these days is like reading Pravda in the heyday of Soviet Communism. This should come as no surprise in an era when the executive branch of the U.S. government is dominated by a faction whose figurehead sports a biography steeped in his ideological affinity for hard-line leftist associates (not excluding the kind of terrorist affinities for which Obama mentor Bill Ayers is justly infamous).

The ostensible decapitation of the al-Qaida terrorist network (otherwise known as the takedown of Osama bin Laden) has just the sort of pretzel twists that beg for an informational Rosetta stone and an expert to make good use of it who is well-versed in the many arcane languages of political intrigue. The sequence of events, like the characters, words and phrases of an unknown language, have what seems to be a familiar structure. But every translation runs into contradictions that disturb the complacent assumption that we are dealing with familiar terms.

Back chatter is also coming to the fore that suggests that both the timeline and substance of the decision-making process were hardly as straightforward as this story line makes them appear. Did the U.S. government know of bin Laden’s whereabouts for weeks or even months? Was there a tussle over the decision to act against bin Laden, one in which considerations of political risk, joined with politically correct concerns about offending Islamic sensibilities to make Obama and his White House associates act the part of timid politicos, rather than intrepid executives with a righteous zeal for justice?

If you had such an intelligence asset, what would drive your decision to liquidate it? Does it serve an intelligence purpose? Is it driven by political considerations? In this case, the story of Obama’s intrepid takedown of the terrorist kingpin draws attention away from the rising influence in the Middle East and North Africa of the fanatical Islamic fundamentalist forces that spawned al-Qaida in the first place. It draws attention away from the pressures now being brought to bear against Israel to accept a practicing terror organization (Hamas) as an interlocutor in the so-called Middle East peace process. And of course, it provides at least a temporary reversal of the American people’s distrust and loss of confidence in Obama and his faction.