Vindication

Power Line comes through with some sites that explore the World Turned Upside Down that has become the Obama administration's approach to the War on Terror Overseas Contingency Operations, culminating in the capture killing of Usama bin Laden.  The motivational poster is thrown in for free:

VINDICATION

When the loudest critic of your policies achieves

his greatest success because of them

One of the sources is the great Victor Davis Hanson (always a good read), who includes this example:

The protocols for taking out Osama bin Laden were all established by President Bush and all opposed by Senator and then candidate Obama. Yet President Obama never seeks to explain that disconnect; indeed, he emphasizes it by the overuse of the first person. When the president reminds us this week of what “over the years I’ve repeatedly made clear,” does he include his opposition to what he now has institutionalized?

Charles Krauthammer weighs in heavily:

The bin Laden operation is the perfect vindication of the War on Terror. It was made possible precisely by the vast, war-like infrastructure that the Bush administration created after 9/11, a fierce regime of capture and interrogation, of dropped bombs and commando strikes. That regime, of course, followed the more conventional war that brought down the Taliban, scattered and decimated al-Qaeda, and made bin Laden a fugitive.

Without all of this, the bin Laden operation could never have happened. Whence came the intelligence that led to Abbottabad? Many places, including from secret prisons in Romania and Poland; from terrorists seized and kidnapped, then subjected to interrogations, sometimes “harsh” or “enhanced”; from Gitmo detainees; from a huge bureaucratic apparatus of surveillance and eavesdropping. In other words, from a Global War on Terror infrastructure that critics, including Barack Obama himself, deplored as a tragic detour from American rectitude.

It's a good review, & a good indication that this discussion is not going away anytime soon.