Lucky for al-Zawahiri That He's Not Number 3...
...or he'd have been dead ten times by now. But it looks like we missed him again, and killed 18 civilians in the process. Oh, and pissed off Pakistan even more.
I can't even think about this mess rationally anymore. Some on the right--including the administration--continue to insist that they did not make a mistake in diverting troops from Afghanistan to Iraq, thus allowing bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to excape from Tora Bora.
Their cover story evolved into: al Qaeda is a network, not a hierarchy, therefore the leaders don't matter. Even ignoring the apparent fallaciousness of this argument, their subsequent actions demonstrate that even the administration doesn't believe its own story. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are apparently important enough that we're willing to offer a total of $50 million in rewards for them, important enough for us to keep pursuing them, important enough to warrant our firing into Pakistan and important enough for us to send Predators firing nearly blind into houses, risking the lives of civilians.
So more than four years after they engineered brutal attacks on American soil, these guys are still running around. They've remained alive and kicking longer after 9/11 than Yamamoto did after Pearl Harbor--and it's not like they have the Japanese Empire protecting them.
As I've said before, it's hard to imagine any administration doing a worse job after 9/11 than the Bush administration has done.
...or he'd have been dead ten times by now. But it looks like we missed him again, and killed 18 civilians in the process. Oh, and pissed off Pakistan even more.
I can't even think about this mess rationally anymore. Some on the right--including the administration--continue to insist that they did not make a mistake in diverting troops from Afghanistan to Iraq, thus allowing bin Laden and al-Zawahiri to excape from Tora Bora.
Their cover story evolved into: al Qaeda is a network, not a hierarchy, therefore the leaders don't matter. Even ignoring the apparent fallaciousness of this argument, their subsequent actions demonstrate that even the administration doesn't believe its own story. Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri are apparently important enough that we're willing to offer a total of $50 million in rewards for them, important enough for us to keep pursuing them, important enough to warrant our firing into Pakistan and important enough for us to send Predators firing nearly blind into houses, risking the lives of civilians.
So more than four years after they engineered brutal attacks on American soil, these guys are still running around. They've remained alive and kicking longer after 9/11 than Yamamoto did after Pearl Harbor--and it's not like they have the Japanese Empire protecting them.
As I've said before, it's hard to imagine any administration doing a worse job after 9/11 than the Bush administration has done.
posted by Winston Smith at
11:22 AM
3 Comments:
Winston, Winston, you are so wrong. It's all Bill Clinton's fault. If he hadn't been playing golf in 1998, he'd have got Bin Laden then. Or earlier when OBL was in Sudan.
Come on, you can't seriously be blaming the Bush administration for this mess!
It's not clear to me OBL and Z are important or that the admin thinks so - but Cheney has put so much diplomatic capital into finding them, and more importantly based so much domestic political rhetoric on their importance, that it's impossible to give the whole thing up as a bad job.
I suppose that my point was that in this case--as in so many others--there's no consistency in their words or in their actions. First it was "wanted dead or alive," then it was "he doesn't matter." First there was letting them slip away at Tora Bora and now there's a $50 million reward on them and we're shooting blind into civilian houses.
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