re: 1 - Its a bit dubious to say we didn't avenge 9/11.
If I planed and paid for the killing of a relative of yours and you got the guy that pulled the trigger but not me, would you feel avenged?
We got the guy who planned it. We also got a lot of other people in the organization. bin Laden wasn't the planner, or the organizer or the "trigger guy" or in direct support of the "trigger guy", and he likely didn't directly pay for it either. He was the CEO who ok'd the plan. He should be taken down as well, but you ignore all the vengeance we did dish out, and just focus on one person.
re: 2 - To this day its uncertain if we ever really had a decent chance at getting bin Laden.
We should have done everything we could at Bora Bora and after to get him.
We did everything that reasonable could be expected under the circumstances. If bin Laden was going to stay at Tora Bora, and we knew he would do so no matter what, than we would have had time to pull in some serious level of ground forces, and close off the area as much as possible (although even that might not have been enough, its a difficult area to shut down), but he was likely gone by the time we had any decent sized ground unit in the area. Maybe we could have increased our chances of getting him at the margin, but he still probably would have gotten away, and more importantly even with 20/20 hindsight its hard to determine the best strategy for getting him there or even if any strategy had a chance.
As for after Tora Bora, we never knew exactly where he was. I suppose we could have not invaded Iraq and thrown the full amount of forces from there in to an invasion of the Pakistani tribal areas (where he probably, but not certainly was located), but this would have been problematic on multiple levels (probably much more difficult, and require a higher cost in life than Iraq has), and he would have been very hard to catch. It took us a long time to find Saddam, with a whole army in Iraq, and that was in many ways an easier search. |
