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Wednesday, September 13, 2006
If Clinton dropped the ball on bin Laden
The story circulating among Clinton-haters, including those with expense accounts at ABC, is that Clinton had numerous chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, but failed to do it. Too cowardly, too cautious, too focused on the polls, too focused on his next hummer -- whatever.
Suppose for a moment that those stories are true. Assume, if you will, that from 1993 to January 2001 we had a dozen opportunities to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Accept as fact, if you will, that Clinton blew every chance.
If it was so easy to target bin Laden in the 1990s, when we had relatively few resources committed to combating terrorism, why has it been so hard to find bin Laden under Bush's watch? If you believe Clinton could've killed bin Laden by uttering "Go!", don't you have to believe that the Bush administration has been tragically incompetent in pursuing bin Laden for the last five years?
Or, is it possible that it's extremely difficult to find one person in mountainous tribal areas without a Tommy Lee Jones leading a nationwide man hunt?
6 Comments:
The whole GOP Clinton argument kills me. Who was the president in September of 2001? How long had he been on the job? Eight Months! The unjustly smeared Richard Clarke stated Bush received a memo stating "Bin Laden DETERMINED to attack the United States." I am not sure people understand what DETERMINED means, otherwise they would never have overlooked this comment: Bush overlooked it, as did the media and most others. I realize this is older news, but it is still no less infuriating. Nice post Hammer.
By 
, at
10:54 AM
Take 9/11 out of the equation -- would you be angry that bin Laden walked free in 2006 even after the Cole, the attacks on the American embassys, the first WTC bombing?
If you wouldn't be angry, how can you blame Clinton? If you would still be angry today about hundreds of deaths how much more angry would you be that bin Laden was still free after thousands of deaths?
I'm not trying to assign blame for the 9/11 attacks. I'm raising a very narrow point. If you believe that Clinton could have captured or killed bin Laden on multiple occassions in the 8 years preceeding 9/11, what can you conclude about Bush's response to 9/11? Why was it so easy for Clinton to find bin Laden, yet has been so difficult for Bush?
I think the answer is that the only way to kill or capture bin Laden is to put significant American forces on the ground in the Afghanistan/Pakistan border regions. Neither president has been willing to make that commitment.
Maybe we had a way of tracking OBL -- an informant, technology, whatever -- in the 1990s that became ineffective after 2000-1. That's possible. Clinton might have had a tool that isn't available to Bush.
I think the most likely answer, though, is that it's exceedingly difficult to find one man in the tribal areas of Pakistan. It's even more difficult to know you've found him. I suspect that both Clinton and Bush have had good leads about OBL's whereabouts, but have never had firm evidence. Every cruise missile attack that fails to kill OBL enhances his standing within his community.
The World Trade Center was bombed in 1993, Clinton had 7 years. Bush was elected and sworn in 2000, he had 8 months to wipe up Clintons' disregard for our safety.When there are so many holes in the dike, which one to plug first?
By , at
4:22 PM
Within 3 years, those responsible for the 1993 bombing were in prison. In all, 10 people were convicted for the attack. Clinton's justice department even managed to obtain the convictions without using secret evidence or torture.
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