I don’t have anything to offer in terms of insights into the Bowe Bergdahl swap.
CNN reports the administration’s line:
“We don’t leave men and women in uniform behind,” he said during a news conference in Warsaw, Poland, on Tuesday.
“This is what happens at the end of wars,” Obama said of the prisoner swap. “Regardless of the circumstances, we still get an American soldier back if he’s held in captivity. Period.”
Hotair.com (among numerous sites) reports on accusations now flying, for instance, “Report: ‘Many’ in intelligence community fear Bergdahl may have been an active collaborator with the Taliban.”
It’s also now becoming clear that the five released Taliban are not to be imprisoned in Qatar, or under house arrest, or under any restriction at all except they may not leave the country for a year.
And the claim that immediate health concerns required release without Congressional notification doesn’t seem to have any evidence as back-up, other than assertions from non-credible Taliban sources.
Did Obama agree upon this arrangement in order to get the VA hospital scandal off the front page? This seems unlikely — unless we are to believe that the arrangement was worked out and just waiting for Obama to pull the trigger?
Was Obama genuinely, truly, simply committed to getting Bergdahl out due to his status as a U.S. soldier, and operates, in this circumstance, under such a black-and-white view that the high credibility of reports of his desertion and possible treason doesn’t matter?
One suspects that this was a trial balloon for a wider release of Taliban from Guatanomo — though why were the first five ones who’ve been described of as “the worst of the worst”? (And the idea that they have some kind of tracking devices embedded in them is preposterous.)
After all, if Obama’s pitch is that “the war is over” because we’ve got the timeline for withdrawing troops and leaving Afghanis to fend for themselves, then we might as well release the remainder of the Taliban anyway, especially since he’s also rejected the notion of a wider “War on Terror.”
(This strikes me as odd, in any case: what defines when a “war” is over when there is no formal declaration of hostilities or surrender or peace treaty? You might as well say that the Korean War is still ongoing, since we have soldiers stationed there for the express purpose of preventing an invasion by the NORKs.)
We did this all once before, remember? We claimed that the Vietnam War was over, politicians touted the peace treaty, we packed up and went home, and refused the South Vietnamese government any residual assistance — and almost immediately afterwards, the communists marched into South Vietnam. And to this day, we still fly POW-MIA flags, and in both Korea and Vietnam, we did “leave men behind,” didn’t we?
UPDATE: The more I think about it, the more I think that the key is that Obama wanted a reason to release these captives. CBS News reports (among others), “In weighing the swap, U.S. officials decided that it could help the effort to reach reconciliation with the Taliban, which the U.S. sees as key to more security in Afghanistan.” It’s preposterous to think that the Taliban, would, upon “reconciling” with the U.S., lay down their arms and partner with other parties to form a human rights-respecting government, but, if that’s your fantasy world, just like the “peace treaty” with North Vietnam, then I suppose a prisoner release makes perfect sense.
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