Don't Politicize the Failed Yemen Raid
The United States lost a Navy SEAL this past week in a raid in Yemen that went wrong. In addition to the loss of the SEAL and a $75 million aircraft, it also appears that several innocent civilian lives were lost—never a good thing, and even worse when one of those innocent civilians appears to have been an 8-year-old girl.
Unnamed military officials told Reuters that “Trump approved his first covert counterterrorism operation without sufficient intelligence, ground support, or adequate backup preparations.”
I was born a few years after the end of the Vietnam War, but never in my own memory has the political opposition to. Yes, there was a lot of domestic opposition to President Bush, which culminated in the 2006 midterms, and yes, Republicans in the Obama years used a wave of Tea Party resentment to obstruct the president’s agenda, but this really and truly is something different. I was catching up with a friend in Congress, a Democrat, earlier this week, and he described the anger of his base as something he had never seen before.
