Funny how it goes: John Kerry seizes the spotlight by announcing his running mate, and the Bush administration trots out Tom Ridge to warn us of more terror attacks. This time, the warning comes with more detail: Osama bin Laden himself, it seems, is plotting another attack on the U.S. But President Bush may find that this timely reminder of the original, genuine global terrorist threat backfires. Because every time we hear the name Osama, we should remember whose policies have left the al-Qaida leader at large.
Over the past year, I’ve made a point of repeatedly referring to the U.S. invasion of Iraq as a strategic mistake. Put aside issues of morality, of justification for the war, of possible deception by U.S. leaders; just consider the issue on the global chessboard for a moment. The next time you hear someone ask whether the U.S. is safer or not as a result of the Bush administration’s war on Saddam Hussein, you can definitively answer “no.” The evidence can be found in today’s report in the New York Times that bin Laden and company intend to attack the U.S. this year in a plot directed from their hideouts on the Afghan/Pakistani border.
This should hardly come as a surprise. These, after all, are the people who attacked the U.S. on 9/11. In the wake of that attack, the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and deposed the Taliban regime that harbored our enemies. But we never finished the job; we left bin Laden free, we left Mullah Omar free, we let Afghanistan drift back into a state of opium-growing, warlord-dominated semi-anarchy. We chose to invade Iraq instead.
We now know a lot more about all the blindered, blinkered reasons that led the Bush administration to this disastrous mistake. What I’ve never understood, and still don’t understand, is why the rest of the U.S. government, and to some extent the U.S. media, have not furiously and persistently asked the obvious, and still hanging, question: Why didn’t we go full-tilt after bin Laden in spring of 2002?
Would it have caused too many casualties? That didn’t seem to be a deterrent factor when it came to invading Iraq. Hundreds of American soldiers have died, and are still dying, in Iraq; such a tragedy might be more justifiable if we felt, as we cannot now, that the sacrifices had a direct connection to the 9/11 attacks — and to preventing their sequel.
Was it out of deference to our shaky alliance with Pakistan? But what good is that alliance if it does not help us capture our most lethal enemies?
I understand that the mountainous border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan is treacherous terrain. It’s historically isolated. Its tribal inhabitants are suspicious of foreigners. But we didn’t get to choose our opponents; 9/11 chose them for us. What if we had invested some portion of the blood and treasure squandered on the Iraqi adventure on a full-bore campaign to “smoke out” bin Laden and rebuild Afghanistan? How would the “War on Terror” look different today? And would we still be facing these ominous warnings of al-Qaida attacks?
I am not one for conspiracy theories. But when we can’t answer these questions, we’re left to less savory speculations. What is actually happening between the Bush administration and the Pakistani government? (We’ve all now seen the reports that the Bush administration is asking Pakistan to round up “high value targets” during the week of the Democratic convention.) Why has finding bin Laden been so impossible? What could possibly be higher-priority for the U.S. than apprehending those responsible for 9/11?
The supposed “grownups” in the Bush Administration have neither answered these questions nor taken responsibility for their mistakes. Our one chance of ever getting the full story is to vote them out and give their replacements a chance to investigate.
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