Not Wanted? - Dead or Alive

While Bush rests, bin Laden plots
Les Payne

July 15, 2007

Does the specter of a live and plotting Osama bin Laden keep President George W. Bush awake nights? Probably not. Yet, it might reassure the country if it had a president who could accept the reality that Bush has become so adept at finessing.

It was bin Laden and al-Qaida, stupid.

This president seems to have been given a pass on the turbaned terrorist who collapsed the Twin Towers. Another of bin Laden's commandeered death jets - lest we forget - crashed into the Pennsylvania countryside and a fourth scored a direct hit on the Pentagon, incinerating, all told, some 2,973 lives.

Initially, Bush swore revenge. It has been 2,130 days, however, since the president declared on Sept. 13, 2001, that "The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. It is our No. 1 priority and we will not rest until we find him." Our well-rested president has not found bin Laden. U.S. intelligence officials informed us last week that the chief executive of a stronger- than-ever al-Qaida is plotting global attacks from his mountain redoubt in Pakistan.

This resurgence mocks U.S. efforts to smash the al-Qaida threat. Bush is as immune to mockery as Bill Clinton is to shame. It was the 43rd president, after all, who shortly after 9/11 deputized himself as U.S. marshal duty-bound to hunt down bin Laden.

"I want justice," Bush said back then. "There's an old poster out West, as I recall, that said, 'Wanted: Dead or Alive.'"

Someone, the record will show, painted the face of Saddam Hussein on Bush's wanted poster and threw the marshal off the trail. "I don't know where bin Laden is," he said a year after deputizing himself. "I have no idea and really don't care. It's not that important. It's not our priority." Even as bin Laden harassed him with videotaped taunts, Bush declared himself "truly not that concerned about him," turning his beady eyes toward Baghdad.

With the nation in tow, Marshal Bush rode down out of the hills with his posse against Iraq. They lynched Hussein, murdered his two sons and tried mightily - without success - to link the dictator to bin Laden and the attack against the United States. Bush tried to make this connection again last week. But he's neck-deep in the conduct of the Iraq war that offers a clinic on incompetent leadership. Arrogance, avarice and oil greed inspired the Bush-Cheney administration's attempts to dupe the citizenry of a superpower into getting bogged down in a quagmire.

What's new and troubling here is word that while the United States fiddles in Iraq's civil war, bin Laden and his al-Qaida cohorts are posing a global threat of 9/11 proportions. With no facts to drive home, Bush pounded the podium Thursday and demanded that he, and not Congress, should dictate war policy. The House voted to spare the next president the Iraq mess by pulling out U.S. troops by April Fool's Day '08.

Earlier, Bush dug in his spurs, insisting that the generals - and apparently not civilian leadership as the U.S. Constitution arranges - be allowed to determine how the war should end. Even the generals are begging for mercy under the harebrained leadership of Bush-Cheney. Even they sense that the jig is up save for determining who will be the last to die for the Iraq lie.

During the more than 1,500 days of the Iraq war, U.S. soldiers have died at the rate of more than two each day. This may not seem like a high body count for oil companies, emergency service workers or noncombatants like Bush and Cheney. For war veterans who feel the senselessness of such horror, it is a ghastly toll that must be brought to an end.

It must have been encouraging to some that The New York Times, whose news pages (chiefly through one reporter) abetted the Iraq war deception, used its editorial page last week to call for a withdrawal. "It is time for the United States to leave Iraq without any more delay than the Pentagon needs to organize an orderly exit."

Earlier would have been better.

Copyright 2007 Newsday Inc.