BlogWood: MT Archives

Remember bin Laden?

President Bush, having diverted resources from Afghanistan and the hunt for Osama bin Laden in favor of invading Iraq and capturing Saddam Hussein, has now decided to start looking for the real bad guys again. Remember: despite Bush’s scary rhetoric leading up to the invasion of Iraq, Iraq was never a partner of Al Quaeda, Iraq never posed an imminent threat to the United States, and Osama continues to elude capture (maybe) to this day.

So while we wasted our time and considerable effort and resources in Iraq, the mastermind behind 911 was all but forgotten about by the man who swore to bring him to justice. But we got Saddam, the weakening leader of a country that was not even a threat to its closest neighbors, much less our glorious “homeland”.

Now, Bush has decided that perhaps he should start worrying about Osama again. Or maybe they are just ramping up the Osama mentions now so that the staged capture in a few months will seem a little more plausible?

President Bush has approved a plan to intensify the effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, senior administration and military officials say, as a combination of better intelligence, improving weather and a refocusing of resources away from Iraq has reinvigorated the hunt along the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The plan will apply both new forces and new tactics to the task, said senior officials in Washington and Afghanistan who were interviewed in recent days. The group at the center of the effort is Task Force 121, the covert commando team of Special Operations forces and Central Intelligence Agency officers. The team was involved in Saddam Hussein's capture and is gradually shifting its forces to Afghanistan to step up the search for Mr. bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar, the former Taliban leader.
......

With a great deal at stake strategically, symbolically and politically, Mr. Bush and his national security team have repeatedly met in recent months to refine the new approach, and it appears to have been approved in the last two months. White House officials will not say exactly when, emphasizing that the hunt for Mr. bin Laden never stopped, though clearly the effort lost momentum.

Can anyone say “understatement”?