THIS Is Why I'm Glad Obama Won In 2008!

John McCain's and Hilary Clinton's faith in the good intentions of the leadership of Pakistan was misplaced. Who looks naive now?

It's also important to give credit to Obama's national security team for the success of the Abbottabad mission. They are better, in general than Clinton's or Carter's teams were. Part of that improvement is due simply to experience, since so much Obama's team once worked for Clinton.

The Abbottabad mission was simpler than the Iranian hostage rescue mission of 1979. For one, there were shorter travel distances (because we now have access to bases in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan), and that helped. Obama gave the military what they needed to do their jobs, unlike Carter. The 1979 helicopter collision killed that hostage-rescue mission, but the 2011 helicopter crash did not kill this mission, which reveals greater depth of capability and planning. Carter had a nearly-neurotic obsession with keeping his mission secret, for strategic reasons, and kept downsizing the mission to lower its profile, so in the end there was no room for error and mishap. Obama had a nearly-neurotic obsession with keeping his mission secret too, but for tactical reasons, because he knew he could not trust the Pakistanis.

What tended to give the Republicans the national security edge for so many years, particularly after the conclusion of the Vietnam War, was their depth of experience in all matters of national security. But, as in all things involving ideology, rigidity has slowly-impaired the GOP, to the point where they no longer have that critical edge. The results speak for themselves: Bush let Osama escape at Tora Bora in 2002, because he and his team trusted the Pakistanis too much, by allowing them to set up the (highly-porous) perimeter at Tora Bora. That hard lesson still hadn't penetrated through GOP skulls as late as 2008, as the video gives witness. Obama repaired that disastrous, naive, puppy-dog trust at Abbottabad in 2011.

Americans like success. Obama brings America success. Americans will like Obama all the better for it. And the 2012 election isn't too far away either....