The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Not Impotent After All
Today we have the benefit of hindsight. On Friday the New York Times did not. Will that restrain us from making fun of the Times? Of course not!
Friday’s Times carried a news story titled “Standoff With Pirates Shows U.S. Power Has Limits.” The headline led one to expect a “think piece” on the implication of the situation then continuing in the Indian Ocean, but in fact the story was mostly a roundup of the facts as they then stood. The headline writer apparently was doing a bit of editorializing.
Of course, the headline’s conclusion, “U.S. Power Has Limits,” is a truism. America is not God, so it is not all-powerful (nor is it all-knowing or even perfectly beneficent). The problem with the Times headline is the claim that the pirate situation shows the limits of U.S. power. The only information in the piece that comes close to backing up the headline is this:
At the time of the attack on the Alabama, the closest patrol vessel was about 300 nautical miles away, a Navy spokesman said.
“It’s that old saying: where the cops aren’t, the criminals are going to go,” said Lt. Nathan Christensen, a Fifth Fleet spokesman. “We patrol an area of more than one million square miles. The simple fact of the matter is that we can’t be everywhere at one time.”
Even this shows a lack of omnipresence, not omnipotence. Anyway, we all know how the story turns out. From today’s Times:
At dusk, a single tracer bullet was seen fired from the lifeboat [where the pirates were holding Richard Phillips, the freighter captain]. The intent was unclear, but it ratcheted up the tension and Seal snipers at the stern rail of the Bainbridge fixed night-vision scopes to their high-powered rifles, getting ready for action.
What they saw was the head and shoulders of two of the pirates emerging from the rear hatch of the lifeboat. Through the window of the front hatch they saw the third pirate, pointing his AK-47 at the back of Captain Phillips, who was seen to be tied up.
That was it: the provocation that fulfilled the president’s order to act only if the captain’s life was in imminent danger, and the opportunity of having clear shots at each captor. The order was given. Senior defense officials, themselves marveling at the skill of the snipers, said each took a target and fired one shot.
Aren’t you glad the Navy snipers were shooting with you rather than at you? They killed three pirates with three shots, in an operation that demonstrated the skill and professionalism of the American military–not the limits of U.S. power. The Times’s Friday headline looks like just the latest example of the paper’s can’t-do attitude toward America.
We wonder about President Obama’s decision to act only in case of “imminent danger” to the hostage. It seems to us that if the snipers had a clear shot at the pirates and Phillips was not in the line of fire, they should have been permitted to act. Even so, all’s well that ends well. London’s Times notes that critics had faulted “Obama’s own silence on the subject last week, ducking questions about whether he would rescue Captain Phillips,” suggesting “a degree of indecision or weakness” reminiscent of the dreaded Jimmy Carter and the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81:
Yesterday the White House was at last able to explain itself. The President had twice authorised military force but was seeking neither to draw undue attention to the situation with mixed signals nor do anything that might threaten Captain Phillips’s life.
The London Times headline reads, “Barack Obama Action May Put Paid to Comparison With Jimmy Carter” (“put paid to” is a Britishism that means “finish off”). This too would be a premature conclusion: Dealing with a gang of pirates who have hijacked a lifeboat is a considerably lesser challenge than dealing with a gang of lunatics who have hijacked a whole country. Still, those of us who’ve been skeptical about whether Obama is tough enough to lead can take some degree of encouragement from yesterday’s events.
Reuters: ‘Occasional Beating’ No Big Deal
From Reuters:
So far, pirates have generally treated hostages well, sometimes roasting goat meat for them and even passing phones round so they can call loved ones. The worst violence reported has been the occasional beating and no hostages are known to have been killed by pirates.
So suffering an “occasional beating” to be consistent with being treated “well”? We hate to imagine how Reuters editors discipline the reporters who work for them.
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