By Rabbi Ben Kamin
ENCINITAS, California — It was shocking and discomfiting to hear a United States Navy Seal (who shall remain unnamed in this dispatch) announcing that he was the shooter on the night of the killing of Osama bin Laden. This American observer remains outraged, ashamed, and despondent in the wake of this lost ship of professionalism.
At this season of honoring (and safeguarding) our veterans and saluting our global defense forces, it was a particularly repugnant, indulgent, and injudicious move and we citizens should demand the seaman’s official reprimand. And we all should feel chastened because this is yet another betrayal of our weakness for gossip, our contempt for honor, and our tendency, in international affairs, towards naiveté.
The self-regarding seaman’s narrative has been repudiated by other members of the elite unit that completed one of the most harrowing assignments in recent military annals—a unit that escaped with only one operational helicopter of the two that arrived in the first place. (Even this should have been classified).
Enfeebled by an easy life (many of us, anyway), given to blather, numbed by useless cyber data, seduced by the accessibility of almost anyone to viral infamy, we Americans have lost our bearings in the categories of self-respect and discipline.
In the Bible, when Jacob observes the near-fratricidal disdain between Joseph and his brothers, we read that “Jacob kept the matter to himself.” He didn’t broadcast the matter to others or call-in to a faux-psychologist on the airwaves. I take it from this marvelous and economic scriptural note that Jacob (who bore a good portion of responsibility for the family dysfunction) gave the issue some thought and discretion. The welfare and protection of his family were at stake—any public pronouncements would be risky, if not incendiary.
Even the White House photograph of the President and his aides tensely monitoring the Bin Laden opreation should have never been published. It skews the capacity of our most sensitive and treacherous operations to proceed without any emotional or speculative inflection—which draws our enemies in voyeuristically and, cynically, reveals way too much about who exactly knows what is better not known by anybody. It also infects our maddeningly perpetual political campaigns with low-level conjecture.
The then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton spent a lot of public relations dollars dispelling the scurrilous notion that her hand was on her mouth because as a woman, “she could not handle” the tension of watching the live image of our warriors carrying out their “secret mission.”
As a matter of fact, the American public (and by default, the planet) did not need to know that Navy Seals specifically engaged and destroyed the target. That’s nobody’s purview. The vast majority of our Seals and countless parallel clandestine combatants and specialists have earned their storied and valiant status exactly because nobody monitors their strategies.
More than at any time since the end of the war in 1945, America has become a national family trying to protect and secure the homeland as well as our service people, intelligence agents, and assets all over the world. Haven’t we learned anything from our democratic brothers and sisters in Israel—which is thrown together with us as the collective “Satan” by the jihadists who would like to kill every one of us?
In 1991, during the original Gulf War, an Israeli general was asked what would be Israel’s response to the torrent of Iraqi Scud missiles launched against Israeli as a surrogate counterattack on the US? His answer, offered without a breath: “We will tell you what we are going to do if and when we want to.”
Let’s shut up and take care of business—not show business.
*
Rabbi Kamin is an author and freelance writer who is based in the San Diego suburb of Encinitas. He may be contacted via ben.kamin@sdjewishworld.com