Oman Daily Observer

Donald Trump intends to milk Baghdadi’s death!

- SEBASTIAN SMITH

President Donald Trump took a victory lap on Sunday over the killing of IS group leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi — and he’s likely just getting warmed up. “This is the biggest there is,” Trump said at a White House appearance, reaching into his customary arsenal of superlativ­es after announcing the dramatic raid by special forces into Syria. The raid was, by US accounts, a remarkable success of intelligen­ce gathering, cooperatio­n with multiple foreign powers in the Syrian war, and ruthless execution by helicopter-borne American soldiers.

But Trump — threatened by a snowballin­g impeachmen­t threat in Washington and stung by widespread criticism of his overall Syria policy — needs the victory to be his.

So amid a sometimes surprising level of detail in his account of the raid, the president shoehorned in plenty of politics — lines that had less to do with counter-terrorism than they did with Trump’s need to boost Donald Trump.

The Baghdadi victory wasn’t just the “biggest.” It had to be bigger than the killing in a similarly daring raid in 2011 of Al Qaeda founder and 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Perhaps that’s because Bin Laden was killed under Trump’s predecesso­r, Democratic president Barack Obama.

“Osama bin Laden was big, but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. (Baghdadi) is a man who built a whole, as he would like to call it, a country,” Trump said.

The 45th president has long struggled, politicall­y speaking, with the mantle of commander-in-chief.

He is dogged by his history of having avoided conscripti­on — along with many other young men of that generation — during the Vietnam War.

And his push to extract the United States from what he calls “stupid” wars in the Middle East and Afghanista­n may be popular with many voters, but is seen as dangerousl­y naive by the Washington elite, including much of his own Republican party. A recent abrupt decision to yank a contingent of US troops from a traditiona­lly Kurdish area of Syria — giving Turkey a green light to attack the same Kurdish forces who had partnered with the US — sparked especially deep anger. The Baghdadi raid provides Trump with a perfect riposte.

Lindsay Graham, one of the senior Republican senators who lambasted Trump over the Kurdish controvers­y, was among the first to declare he’d seen the light.

“This is a moment where President Trump’s worst critics should say, ‘Well done,’” he said.

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