FOCUS | Where Is Osama bin Laden? Day 1,461 and Counting

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FOCUS | Where Is Osama bin Laden? Day 1,461 and Counting

Sun, 11 Sep 2005 08:58:43 -0700

 

 

 

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/091105Y.shtml

 

 

Where Is Osama bin Laden? Day 1,461 and Counting

By Michael Tomasky

The American Prospect

 

It's the fourth anniversary of September 11 - and Osama bin Laden

is still at large.

 

Thursday 08 September 2005

 

This September 11 will mark the fourth anniversary of the

terrorist attacks on the United States. The media will focus on the

ceremonies at the former World Trade Center site, the Pentagon, and

other cities and towns around the country that will honor the dead.

The Bush administration, meanwhile, will do its best to remind

Americans that today's George W. Bush - except for the Watergate-era

Richard Nixon, the most unpopular two-term president, at this point in

his tenure, since scientific polling began in the 1940s - is the same

man who led the country through tragedy.

 

In truth, the anniversary should be the occasion for a

thoroughgoing discussion of how America has combated terrorism in the

last four years. And on that front, even the disaster Bush has created

in Iraq takes a back seat to one overwhelming fact: By the time night

falls on September 11, Osama bin Laden will have been at large for

1,461 days.

 

America vanquished world fascism in less time: We obtained

Germany's surrender in 1,243 days, Japan's in 1,365. Even the third

Punic War, in which Carthage was burned to the ground and emptied of

citizens who were taken en masse into Roman slavery, lasted around

1,100 days (and troops needed a little longer to get into position

back in 149 B.C.).

 

Yes, yes: It can be harder to find one stateless man than to

defeat an army whose troop movements can be tracked. And that would be

a good excuse - if the Bush administration had bothered to make

capturing bin Laden a priority.

 

John Kerry can't be accused, alas, of having offered a coherent

foreign policy in last year's campaign, but he was dead right when he

said the administration had " outsourced " the job of finding the man

responsible for the most deadly attacks ever on American soil. As the

journalist Peter Bergen wrote in The Atlantic last October, we were

closing in on al-Qaeda leadership in December 2001. But the United

States decided to leave the crucial two-week battle of Tora Bora

chiefiy to local Afghan fighters. It was, Bergen wrote, " a blunder

that allowed many members of al-Qaeda, including Osama bin Laden

himself, to slip away. "

 

And, of course, we know why that battle was left to locals - and

why, relatedly, we never had more than about 10,000 troops in

Afghanistan in 2001. (How's Afghanistan going today? We now have

18,000 troops there, and 2005 has been the deadliest year for U.S.

forces since the fighting began.)

 

The Bush administration had already decided, at the very least, to

find an excuse to invade Iraq. We know from Richard Clarke's testimony

and other sources that administration officials, including Bush

himself, started asking the counterterrorism chief to find an Iraqi

link to 9-11 from the day following the attacks. On December 11, 2001

- right around the time bin Laden began his escape, possibly the very

day - Vice President Dick Cheney told FOX News, " If I were Saddam

Hussein, I'd be thinking very carefully about the future, and I'd be

looking very closely to see what happened to the Taliban in Afghanistan. "

 

Whatever the apologists say, the truth is simple: The

administration held back troops from Afghanistan so that it could send

150,000 to Iraq. That, and nothing else, is the reason bin Laden is

still at large.

 

But listen closely to the silence: Outside of magazines like this

one and a handful of liberal Web sites, the subject is rarely discussed.

 

Just imagine bin Laden having been at large this long in President

Al Gore's administration. In fact, it's impossible to imagine, because

President Gore, under such circumstances, wouldn't have lasted this

long. You probably didn't know, until you read this column, the number

of days bin Laden has been at large. But I assure you that if Gore had

been president, you and every American would have known, because the

right would have seen to it that you knew, asking every day, " Where's

Osama? " If Gore hadn't been impeached, it's doubtful he'd have

survived a re-election campaign, with Americans aghast at how weak and

immoral a president had to be to permit those 2,700 deaths to go

unavenged this long.

 

To be sure, the difference is partly a Democratic failure -

they're afraid of the right-wing noise machine, pure and simple.

That's a failure of nerve, and it's an appalling one.

 

But the moral failure belongs to Bush and his subordinates and

their amen chorus of slatternly propagandists and so-called

intellectuals, who made great political advantage of 9-11 but spit on

the grieving families by pretending that there is no imperative in

seeing justice done for their losses. They may be able to control the

dialogue, but they can't control the facts - and the facts condemn

them all.

 

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Michael Tomasky is the Prospect's executive editor.

 

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