Can a situation room picture be worth millions of votes? Democrats hope Isis strike will show Biden ‘back in charge’
Some will consider it tasteless to consider poll numbers after women and children were killed but such calculations are already being made, says Andrew Buncombe
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Your support makes all the difference.Do the overwhelming majority of Americans know that the head of Isis was named Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi? Almost certainly not.
Will most have approved of the decision to kill him in a raid carried out by US special forces in northern Syria? Probably.
Will Joe Biden see his poll numbers rise in the aftermath? Almost certainly. Will that bump be big enough or last long enough to help Democrats in the midterm elections? Ahh. Therein lies the rub.
Some people will, no doubt correctly, deem it tasteless to be talking poll numbers when the bodies of more than a dozen people killed in the raid, among them six children and four women, have barely been recovered from the rubble of the three-storey building in the town of Atmeh, close to the border with Turkey.
Biden claimed the US military had taken every precaution to avoid civilian casualties. But every American leader, either political or military, makes such claims after these events, and often we later learn the true civilian toll is much graver, and that there was little regard to “collateral damage”.
What we do know right now, is that Qurayshi, who took over the leadership of Isis on October 31 2019, just days after leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi died following a raid ordered by Donald Trump in the same area, marks the latest in a succession of US operations that have targeted the head of terror organisations, or so-called “rogue states”.
“Thanks to the bravery of our troops this horrible terrorist leader is no more,” Biden said on Thursday morning.
He claimed Qurayshi had been responsible for a recent raid on a prison to try and release Isis fighters, as well as genocide against the Yazidi people in Iraq in 2014.
He claimed that, as was similarly said about Baghdadi, the Isis leader set off a suicide bomb that killed him and several family members rather than give himself up to US forces.
“In a final act of desperate cowardice, he chose to blow up the third floor instead of facing justice, taking several members of his own family with him.”
When George W Bush announced that the US had captured Saddam Hussein in 2004, he saw his approval rating jump.
Similarly, Bill Clinton enjoyed a bump in his numbers after ordering missile strikes against alleged Al-Qaeda targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, one of which is said to have narrowly missed Osama Bin Laden.
Barack Obama saw his numbers jump by as much nine points after he ordered the raid in May 2011 that finally saw the Al-Qaeda leader killed at his compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
Even Jimmy Carter saw a small bump in his approval ratings after ordering what turned into a botched raid to rescue 52 American hostages in Iran in 1980, the rationale being that at least he was taking action.
Yet, in each of these cases, as with the credit Americans gave to Trump for the operation that resulted in the death of Baghdadi, such increases are rarely lasting.
The White House said that vice president Kamala Harris and other senior members of his national security team had monitored the raid through a live feed in the situation room, and promptly released a photograph of them doing so.
A certain iconography has emerged around such photographs. The image released of the Bin Laden raid showed Obama dressed in a windbreaker and polo shirt, given he had just returned to the White House on the afternoon of May 1 2011, after playing golf at Joint Base Andrews.
He had done do, reportedly, to avoid any questions about why he had changed his typical Sunday routine.
The photograph also showed Biden, who had opposed the raid and was wearing a shirt but no jacket or tie, and Hillary Clinton, her mouth covered by her hand, she would later say to hide a gasp.
“On the day when I was in the situation room monitoring the raid that brought Osama bin Laden to justice, he was hosting The Celebrity Apprentice,” Clinton would say during her final debate with Trump during the 2016 presidential race.
By contrast, the image released by the White House in 2019 when Trump was president showed him dressed in a formal suit, staring directly into the camera. He too had recently returned from the golf course, but wished to send a message by his choice of clothes.
Vice President Mike Pence was similarly dressed, as was Defense Secretary Mark Esper, and Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser. Gen Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was in military uniform.
In the most recent photograph, Biden has opted for somewhere half-between – he is wearing his tie, but not a jacket, as well as a mask. Harris and the others are similar formally dressed and with masks.
Biden’s approval ratings started to plummet last August, as the emergence of the Delta variant meant the hoped-for end of the pandemic did not happen, and the chaotic withdrawal of US troops from Afghanistan in what was widely perceived to have been debacle. Critics and supporters of the president, both in the US and internationally, claimed it suggested it was another thing the president was not able to control.
According to the tally carried by the website FiveThirtyEight, Biden’s current approval rating stands at just 41 points, with a disapproval of 52. The midterm elections are less than 10 months away, and Democrats are desperate for some positive news to use to go out and campaign with when they speak to voters.
In the latest photograph, Biden can be seen looking intently at the feed of the action taking place thousands of miles away.
And when he spoke to the American people, he did so with words that had been carefully chosen.
He said: “This operation is testament to America’s reach and capability to take out terrorist threats no matter where they try to hide anywhere in the world.”
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