US Navy SEAL who killed Bin Laden thinks military parade is a bad idea
The former US Navy SEAL who killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011 is not happy about Trump's idea for a military parade.
He called it "third world bulls---" in a tweet, though he later acknowledged that the US has had military parades in the past.
Many veterans oppose the idea of a parade, but the details of the event have yet to be worked out.
Robert O'Neill, the former US Navy SEAL who killed Osama Bin Laden in a 2011 raid in Abbottabad, Pakistan, has weighed in on President Donald Trump's idea to have a military parade — and he's not happy.
"A military parade is third world bulls---. We prepare. We deter. We fight. Stop this conversation," O'Neill tweeted on Thursday.
O'Neill joined a chorus of US military veterans who oppose the idea of a parade and US pundits who have likened Trump to a dictator for his desire to see the military paraded around the US.
But O'Neill himself acknowledged that the US has held military parades before in later tweets, and asserted to another Twitter user that Russia and France — two countries that regularly hold military parades — were indeed third world countries because they couldn't take over the world like the US could.
Historically, the term "third world" refers to countries that aligned with neither the West or the Soviet Union during the cold war, but the term has since fallen out of favor and taken on a broader meaning.
Blue countries are first world, or US and NATO aligned, red countries are second world, or Soviet Union aligned, and green countries are third world, with no particular alignment. Vorziblix via Wikimedia Commons
In another tweet, O'Neill made clear his idea of a military parade befitting the US: Thunder run, the 2003 US military attack on Baghdad which quickly took the city.
We had a parade once. It was 2003 and we called it a Thunder Run. Someone remind Vladimir ....
— Robert J. O'Neill (@mchooyah) February 8, 2018
Trump has instructed the Pentagon to draw up plans for the parade, but the content, location, and timing of the event have yet to be decided.
