Still, when you consider the Bush family's cozy corporate relationship with the bin Ladens, you'd think the appearance of impropriety and conflcit of interest alone, if not because of the 3000 innocent lives taken five years ago today, would've given the Bush administration incentive to capture Osama bin Laden long before now.
But I'll let Paul Krugman have his say...
And so he does.
Five years ago, the nation rallied around a president who promised vengeance against those responsible for the atrocity of 9/11. Yet Osama bin Laden is still alive and at large. His trail, The Washington Post reports, has gone "stone cold." Osama and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are evidently secure enough in their hideaway that they can taunt us with professional-quality videos.
Meanwhile, much of Afghanistan has fallen back under the control of drug-dealing warlords and of the Taliban, which sheltered Al Qaeda before it was driven from Kabul. [...]
The path to this strategic defeat began with the failure to capture or kill bin Laden. Never mind the anti-Clinton hit piece, produced for ABC by a friend of Rush Limbaugh; there never was a clear shot at Osama before 9/11, let alone one rejected by Clinton officials. But there was a clear shot in December 2001, when Al Qaeda's leader was trapped in the caves of Tora Bora. He made his escape because the Pentagon refused to use American ground troops to cut him off.
At the same time, the administration balked at giving the new regime in Kabul the support it needed. As he often does, Mr. Bush said the right things: the history of conflict in Afghanistan, he declared in April 2002, has been "one of initial success, followed by long years of floundering and ultimate failure. We're not going to repeat that mistake."
But he proceeded to do just that, neglecting Afghanistan in ways that foreshadowed the future calamity in Iraq. During the first 18 months after the Taliban were driven from power, the U.S.-led coalition provided no peacekeeping troops outside the capital city. Economic aid, in a destitute nation shattered by war, was minimal in the crucial first year, when the new government was trying to build legitimacy. And the result was the floundering and failure we see today.
But Iraq doesn't explain it all. Even though the Bush administration was secretly planning another war in early 2002, it could still have spared some troops to provide security and allocated more money to help the Karzai government. As in the case of planning for postwar Iraq, however, Bush officials apparently refused even to consider the possibility that things wouldn't go exactly the way they hoped.
These days most agonizing about the state of America's foreign policy is focused, understandably, on the new enemies we've made in Iraq. But let's not forget that the perpetrators of 9/11 are still at large, five years later, and that they have re-established a large safe haven.
The first 'comment' is killer:
Yeah: a large safe haven bunkered in Maryland, run by the Vice President.
If this administration ever kept one of its promises other than the ones it's made to rich people, it might give me a heart attack out of sheer surprise. I'm in no danger.
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