" Bin Laden would have been killed by any president who was in office at the time, simply, because the president didn't do anything but say, "Yeah, I want you to kill the most hated person on Earth if you get the chance.""
WRONG. Obama made bin Laden a priority again.
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ANALYSIS: Bush’s Lackluster Hunt For Bin Laden
By Alex Seitz-Wald on May 3, 2011 at 1:45 pm
thinkprogress.org
Politico reports that supporters of George W. Bush are “irked” that the former president isn’t getting more credit for the killing of Osama bin Laden, despite the droves of conservatives lawmakers and pundits who have been rushing to give Bush equal credit as Obama.
But this praise for Bush relies on rewriting history to obscure the fact Obama re-prioritized the hunt for Bin Laden after Bush had largely abandoned the effort to focus on Iraq.
While many conservatives are triumphantly replaying Bush’s September 2001 declaration that he would find Bin Laden, just months later, by Bush’s own account, he was unconcerned about the terrorist mastermind. Asked about the hunt for Bin Laden at a March, 2002 press conference, Bush said, “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq.” “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you,” Bush added.
By 2006, the trail for Bin Laden had gone “stone cold” and Weekly Standard editor Fred Barnes said Bush told him that hunting Bin Laden was “not a top priority use of American resources.” (Indeed, there was a flailing war in Iraq to fight.)
That year, it was revealed that the administration had shuttered the CIA’s Bin Laden unit in late 2005. As the New York Times reported at the time, the move reflected a shift in resources to Iraq:
In recent years, the war in Iraq has stretched the resources of the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon, generating new priorities for American officials. For instance, much of the military’s counterterrorism units, like the Army’s Delta Force, had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.
But Bush’s biggest misstep in the Bin Laden hunt occurred years before, in the early days of the war in Afghanistan. As a 2009 Senate Foreign Relations Committee report found, the Bush administration blew a critical opportunity to capture Bin Laden in 2001. Bin Laden was wounded and on the run, but top Bush national security officials rejected repeated pleas for reinforcements from commanders and intelligence officials fighting the terrorist leader in the caves of Tora Bora, despite the availability of resources:
Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias. [...]
Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, [Commanding Gen. Tommy] Franks refused to deviate from the plan.
The report “removes any lingering doubts and makes it clear that Osama bin Laden was within our grasp at Tora Bora,” but that decisions made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputies, and other top administration officials allowed Bin Laden to escape.
The consequence of this missed ooportunity are tremendous. As Lt. Col. Reid Sawyer, the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point, told NPR yesterday, “if bin Laden had been killed in Afghanistan eight years ago in the caves of Tora Bora, al-Qaida might well have died with him. Now the organization is diversified enough it could weather bin Laden’s death — and hardly miss a beat.”
Moreover, as Rumsfeld himself acknowledged, Bush’s extra-legal torture and rendition policies did not help capture Bin Laden. Enhanced interrogation techniques did not work. Bush ordered one final push to capture Bin laden shortly before he left office, but this effort too was unsuccessful.
..and
Bin Laden's Death 'Huge Victory' For Obama
RENEE MONTAGNE and MARA LIASSON
npr.org
The hunt for Osama bin Laden goes back to former President Bill Clinton. So his death is a big victory for the White House and will dominate the news for some time, NPR's White House correspondent Mara Liasson tells Renee Montagne. Obama will most likely use the theme of "unity" in his future speeches, Liasson says.
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RENEE MONTAGNE, host:
This is special coverage from NPR News. I'm Renee Montagne with Steve Inskeep.
As we've been reporting all morning, President Obama announced last night that Osama bin Laden has been killed in his hideout in Pakistan, by American special forces.
For an update on what's happening at the White House this morning, we turn now to NPR's Mara Liasson. Good morning.
MARA LIASSON: Good morning, Renee.
MONTAGNE: What is the latest?
LIASSON: Well, the latest is that Obama administration officials report that DNA evidence has proven Osama bin Laden is dead. We knew that last night, U.S. forces took photographs of the body, and they used facial recognition technology to compare them with known pictures of bin Laden, and they were 99 percent sure that they had the right guy.
Now they've used DNA evidence, and they are very certain. We also know that Osama bin Laden's body has been buried at sea. Muslim custom dictates that bodies be buried within one day and last night, administration officials made a point of saying that they respect those customs, and that they were going to treat the body accordingly.
MONTAGNE: OK. So those are some of the facts. Let's turn to some of the politics of this event. How big a victory is this for the president?
LIASSON: It's a huge victory. He is the president who got Osama bin Laden, and three presidents have been trying to get him - for many years. This is a huge national security victory. It's generated some headlines that some people thought they'd never see, such as Cheney Congratulates Obama.
So very big victory for him. And he took a big risk. He decided not to bomb the compound. He wanted to make sure that he got Osama bin Laden, so he took the riskier decision of sending the Navy Seals, by helicopter, into the compound. He exercised leadership by taking a risk - because this could have ended up like Desert One, with Jimmy Carter's helicopters stranded in the desert, or Black Hawk Down.
And there was a moment last night, we know, when one of the helicopters malfunctioned. It - one of the blades might have hit a wall in the compound, but it had to be abandoned. And the president, who was monitoring this from the White House - everyone really had a tense moment then. They all were thinking of Black Hawk Down and Desert One. But as it turns out, the pilot and the men got out of the helicopter fine. They blew it up, and they went on their mission.
MONTAGNE: So - and also, Mara, when you say this goes back three presidents, it's a reminder that this hunt for Obama - sorry, this hunt for bin Laden -goes back to President Clinton.
LIASSON: That's right. It goes back to President Clinton. There have been many attempts to get him, and they have failed. And now, President Obama is the man who got Osama bin Laden.
MONTAGNE: And what effect might this have on his presidency, going forward?
LIASSON: Well, it's going to have - we don't know exactly what kind of effect, but we know it's going to have a big one. First of all, there's the simple fact that this is going to dominate the news for quite some time, and I think that that's a good thing for him. Eventually, it will fade away, and gas prices and the economy and the deficit will be the issues that the 2012 election will be decided on. But for a while, this is a very good thing.
It also allows him to stress the theme of unity. In his remarks last night, he said: Remember after 9/11 when the country came together. And he acknowledged, yes, that unity has frayed a bit. But this gives him an opportunity, and I wouldn't be surprised if you hear him talking about this theme tonight, today, and in the days ahead - this was his signature theme.
He was elected as the man who could bridge partisan divisions. And it turns out that tonight, he had already invited the bipartisan leadership of Congress to come up and have dinner with him and the first lady. This is a social dinner. This is the kind of outreach, social outreach, that his news chief of staff, Bill Daley, has encouraged him to do.
And it turns out that they're coming up just 24 hours after bin Laden has been killed, and he'll make remarks at that dinner. And the timing of the dinner is important because later this week - on Thursday - the vice president is going to start budget negotiations with the leaders of both parties in Congress, seeing if they can find a way to avert a default on the United States' debt.
So this is a good start to those negotiations. It will certainly give the president a boost.
MONTAGNE: Thanks very much, Mara. That's NPR's Mara Liasson, joining us live from the White House. |
