The objections come mainly over the way he did it: He traded five high-ranking Taliban detainees from the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who many sources call the most dangerous U.S. detainees on the island.
Yet the president makes no apologies, he says, for following the time-honored American military ethos: Leave no man or woman behind. The big dispute, his opponents fume, is over the price.
But what, I ask, is the alternative? When a civilized country is drawing down a military action, as the U.S. is withdrawing from Afghanistan, it does not leave its soldiers behind, even if big questions surround them like the current uproar around Bergdahl.
We are not, for example, like Joseph Stalin. After beating Adolf Hitler’s army in the Battle of Stalingrad, the Russian dictator was offered a high-value POW, his own eldest son, in exchange for a captured German field marshal. Yet Stalin refused. “I will not trade a marshal for a lieutenant,” he is reported to have said. The son, famously unloved by his father, would die in a German prison camp.
At the other, more honorable extreme, it’s hard to beat the risks taken by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he approved the release three years ago of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners — including convicted terrorists responsible for hundreds of Israeli deaths — to free Gilad Shalit, an Israeli sergeant who had been held captive by Hamas for five years.
Where Team Obama appears to have been caught off-guard is in the furor against Bergdahl.
By most accounts, Bergdahl did his job and performed like a quirky, adventurous oddball who kept to himself in a culture that can be unforgiving to nonconformists.
He also walked away twice before, once during training in California and once in Afghanistan, but he returned both times on his own. Was he on another one of his dangerous walkabouts in 2009 when he walked into the arms of the Taliban? Was he AWOL, which is a minor offense, or a deserter, meaning he did not intend to return?
Perhaps now he can tell his side of the story. If he broke laws, he should be prosecuted. If a real court martial is necessary, it would be better than his current court martial by news media.
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