Channel-surfing over the weekend, I noticed that Wolfgang Petersen’s “Air Force One” was showing. I didn’t stop to watch it. I own it on Blu-Ray — so I can actually hear Gary Oldman saying “smart bomb” in his extreme Russian accent any time.
But it reminded me of something.
Back in the late ’90s, I mentioned that movie in a conversation with then Secretary of Defense William Cohen. I was in Washington on one of those things where senior government officials invite journalists from the boonies to interviews as a way of trying to bypass the Washington press corps and speak straight to the people — or relatively so. The idea being that we’re less cynical, or more gullible, or something.
Anyway, at one point I suppose I confirmed Cohen’s faith in my lack of sophistication — thanks to my own odd sense of humor. There were several of us at the table speaking with the secretary, and someone was talking about some intractable international situation — Saddam Hussein, perhaps, or maybe Moamar Qaddafi — and expressing the American people’s supposed frustration. There was an implication in what this guy was saying that there was some simple solution that the Clinton Administration was simply failing to employ. I couldn’t resist facetiously saying, “Yeah, after all, everyone who has seen the opening of ‘Air Force One’ knows we can just send in a SEAL team and snatch a troublesome foreign leader neatly and cleanly and with no U.S. casualties, right out of his own house, any time we want to.” (To see what I’m talking about, start at about 2:50 on this clip.)
I expected Cohen to get that I was kidding, that I was making fun of Hollywood and the way it can unrealistically shape public expectations, and give me an ironic smile before patiently explaining reality to the other guy. Instead, he looked at me and explained very patiently and without a crack of a smile that it wasn’t that easy in real life.
I was so embarrassed that he thought I was that unsophisticated that I didn’t realize how difficult and rare, even impossible, such a coup de main operation can be. I think I muttered something about, “I was kidding…,” but I don’t think it did any good.
But here’s the wild and ironic thing: Cohen and I were both wrong. The bin Laden raid proved that — conditions being right — we CAN do stuff like that. This thought has occurred to me a number of times since May 1, and I was reminded of it again over the weekend.
Tell you what, though — I still don’t think a man swinging back and forth as he dangles from a parachute can shoot a guard on a roof in the back of the head with one shot, from hundreds of yards away — laser sight or no laser sight…
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Don’t you just hate it someone doesn’t get that you’re trying to be sarcastic. Happens to me all the time.
By the way, do you remember how, in Petersen’s movie, the raid to snatch the renegade leader is followed up by President Harrison Ford’s speech in which he warns the thugs of the world that from now on, the U.S. would not negotiate or seek U.N. sanctions or anything else with the likes of them, that we would no longer be afraid, that it was the terrorists’ and tyrants’ turn to “be afraid”?
Well, some of you may have thought of that as a neocon fantasy that just happened to predate W. by a few years. But as it happen, that is just how the Obama administration is using the bin Laden raid, according to the WSJ:
Except that there are no chest-thumping speeches. We’re using the Teddy Roosevelt “Big Stick” approach, with the emphasis on the speaking softly. We’re letting our actions speak for us.
By the way, that WSJ story today that I just cited, which is about how the CIA-military team-up that got bin Laden is providing a new model for covert ops — and more — is pretty interesting. Here’s another passage that particularly struck me:
… which sort of goes to the theme of this post.