When a president orders military action to protect our nation, we don’t second-guess him.
So we’re not going to Monday-morning-quarterback the failed raid President Obama ordered in Somalia.
There, Navy SEALs attacked but couldn’t capture leaders of the terror group that is thought responsible for the gruesome killings last month at a Kenyan mall. Meanwhile, a similar raid in Libya succeeded in capturing a senior al Qaeda operative sought in the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
These operations have yielded two real gains. First, we now have in custody — aboard one of our ships — a senior al Qaeda leader whom we can interrogate for vital intelligence. Second, even the unsuccessful Somalia operation will have terrorists looking over their shoulders.
These are timely developments in a troubled part of the world. Whatever the president might say about “core al Qaeda” being on the run, the inflow of al Qaeda operatives to a weakly governed Libya and attacks like the one we saw in Nairobi confirm that al Qaeda has not withered away.
The last time we abandoned a country to terrorists (pre-9/11 Afghanistan) our enemies ended up knocking down two towers here and killing thousands.
So we hope these raids are the administration’s de facto acknowledgment that al Qaeda’s fight continues even as it has changed — and so must ours.