According to Pentagon sources, President Obama stalled for almost a month on the rescue attempt of American journalist James Foley. When he finally gave the rescue team the green light, Foley and the other hostages had already been moved by ISIS militants. A month later, Foley was executed.

RCP’s Toby Harnden reports:

For President Barack Obama the decision to send in the Night Stalkers was an agonising one. The audacious bin Laden raid in Pakistan had been a success but also preying on his mind was the failed 1980 Delta Force operation to rescue American hostages in Tehran…

Pentagon sources said Foley and the others might well have been rescued but Obama, concerned about the ramifications of US troops being killed or captured in Syria, took too long to authorise the mission.

Anthony Shaffer, a former lieutenant-colonel in US military intelligence who worked on covert operations, said: “I’m told it was almost a 30-day delay from when they said they wanted to go to when he finally gave the green light. They were ready to go in June to grab the guy [Foley] and they weren’t permitted.”

Contrasting the operation with the successful Osama bin Laden raid, HotAir's Allahpundit offered some thoughts on the possible rationale for Obama’s delay:

Maybe Obama thought he simply didn’t have the political capital needed on foreign policy anymore to make this call at the time. Scroll through his job approval ratings on foreign policy over the past six months. Starting in March, around the time that Putin began bullying Ukraine, his approval goes from single digits negative to double digits. If he had ordered the Foley raid quickly and it failed, it would have reinforced the image of a guy who’s at sea in dealing with bad actors abroad. So he waited, probably hoping things would turn around a bit before giving the order. Unfortunate.