Biden's Diminishing Confidence in Abbottabad

I try strenuously to avoid political issues here, but Vice President Joseph Biden told a whopper about the Abbottabad raid at a New Jersey fundraiser last night that bears noting. 

According to The Huffington Post, the Vice President declared:

You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.

This provokes head-scratching on two levels.  First, with all due respect to the SEAL and SOCOM planners who actually developed the plan for the raid, I think that the 1970 Son Tay raid to rescue POWs in North Vietnam, the 1950 Inchon landing, Operation Overlord/D-Day, to name a few, were equally audacious, perhaps even greater given the consequences of failure.

Second, this is part of a pattern I expect we'll see repeatedly over the course of the election year as Administration officials consistently understate the probability of bin Laden's presence at Abbottabad.  According to Eric Schmidle's report in the New Yorker:

[CIA Director Leon] Panetta convened more than a dozen senior C.I.A. officials and analysts for a final preparatory meeting. Panetta asked the participants, one by one, to declare how confident they were that bin Laden was inside the Abbottabad compound. The counterterrorism official told me that the percentages “ranged from forty per cent to ninety or ninety-five per cent.” [Emphasis added]

Similarly, in "The Man Who Hunted Osama bin Laden," the Associated Press reported: "Panetta held regular meetings on the hunt, often concluding with an around-the-table poll: How sure are you that this is bin Laden?  John was always bullish, rating his confidence as high as 80 percent." [Emphasis added]

Finally, in September a White House insider told Newsweek that some intelligence officers "thought that it was high as 80 or 90 percent."  That insider?  President Obama.

Again, the President deserves full credit for ordering the Abbottabad raid, but I don't think there is anybody who doesn't believe that President Bush would have ordered the raid under similar circumstances.  (Whether Clinton would have or not is a more interesting question, although I think ultimately he would have given the green light had he been President post-9/11).  I also think it is unseemly for Administration officials to try to inflate the fortitude it took to authorize the operation for political purposes.

No Bin Laden Bounce?

Although I generally stay away from domestic politics on this blog, I've been asked in several interviews and talks about the domestic ramifications of strategic manhunts.  At ForeignPolicy.com, Scott Clement has an interesting analysis of the effect of strategic manhunts on Presidential popularity. 

Clement finds that successful strategic manhunts (i.e. bin Laden, Saddam, Noriega) only produce a temporary rise in approval for Presidents, which quickly dissipates as the public moves on to other issues.  The data also suggests that "Americans don't necessarily punish a president for failing to track down an archnemesis," citing George W. Bush being favored over John Kerry by more than 20 points in September 2004 when it came to trust on handling terrorism despite Senator Kerry's attempt to make Bush's failure to kill/capture Osama bin Laden a key theme of his presidential campaign.  (I would be interested to see what the data on Clinton towards the end of the failed Aideed manhunt was . . . )

In the end, although killing bin Laden may inoculate President Obama somewhat by making Americans feel safer from terrorism, Clement concludes that "The Harsh reality of taking down bogeymen is that once they've been removed from action, Americans may turn to judge the president on other issues.  As with Bush in 1992, Obama's 2012 fate hinges on how voters think he's handling the economy, not his vanquishing of America's most despised enemy."