George Bush and his cronies are constantly puffing out their chests and talking tough about Iraq and terror. Dick Cheney invoked al Qaeda in a vicious attack on leading Democrats. They're sounding like they did in 2002. Same language, same threats -- but it's mostly just for political purposes. Bush and Cheney should be thinking back to 2001 when they ignored Bin Laden and al Qaeda the first time. Frank Rich shows us that it is 2001 all over again:
The White House doesn’t want to hear it now, either. That’s why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by goingpublic, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States” (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on “24”). Al Qaeda is “on the march” rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress. Tony Blair is pulling troops out of Iraq not because Basra is calm enough to be entrusted to Iraqi forces — it’s “not ready for transition,” according to the Pentagon’s last report — but to shift some British resources to the losing battle against the resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan.Twice.
This is why the entire debate about the Iraq “surge” is as much a sideshow as Britney’s scalp. More troops in Baghdad are irrelevant to what’s going down in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war’s critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?
The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice.
Note to the media: Just because Bush says he's fighting the war on terror, doesn't mean it's true. Yesterday, the Army's Chief of Staff said of capturing or killing Bin Laden, "I don't know that it's all that important, frankly."
Frankly, that was the attitude of George Bush and Dick Cheney back in 2001. Look where that got us.
