What Killing Bin Laden Means for Obama

By Alexis Simendinger
RealClearPolitics

Twenty-four hours before President Obama announced to a surprised world that Osama bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces during a dramatic raid on a hideout near Islamabad, the president was calmly delivering a comedy sketch in Washington.

While he gently upbraided the assembled media for too-often missing the big picture, he lampooned recent knocks on his presidential leadership, most prominently those coming from Donald Trump. Obama's critics had been painting him for months as passive, risk-averse, and dangerously muddled in his foreign policy. The president chose to sharply ridicule Trump's claims to seismic decisiveness in comparison with "what keeps me up at night."

One day later, in a somber address from the White House, the president proved his point about what has been disturbing his sleep. Separate from releasing his birth certificate, consoling tornado-ravaged Alabamans, and preparing to battle Republicans in Congress over federal spending, the commander-in-chief secretly approved a bold strike to drop U.S. forces behind the walls of a compound in Pakistan to find and kill bin Laden.

The architect of 9/11 was finally located living with family members inside a property near Pakistan's bustling capital, according to administration officials. After years of painstaking sleuthing, the intelligence community traced bin Laden through links to a trusted associate, who also was killed on Sunday.

(More here.)