Who's Afraid of Osama Bin Laden?

After September 11 President Bush said that he wanted Osama Bin Laden "dead or alive." Then in 2002 the President said of Bin Ladin "I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run. I just don't spend that much time on him." And now we find out that the CIA stopped looking for him a year ago, shutting down the unit that was set up ten years ago to find him. Some liberals are saying that our failure to get Osama Bin Laden shows that the President is not that serious about the War on Terror. But I think that this is actually part of a brilliant strategy to win the War on Terror once and for all by making him completely beside the point.

Osama Bin Laden must have known that the United States would go after him after September 11 and he probably thought that we would make him a martyr to his cause. But President Bush is not so easily fooled. That is why he said he wanted Bin Laden "dead or alive." Apparently, the President decided that "alive" was the best choice. Instead of making him a martyr, we have done something better: we have made him irrelevant.

After the United States cut and run from Lebanon and Somalia, Bin Laden believed that we would make the same mistake again. But in Afghanistan we outfoxed Bin Laden by barely participating at all. We let the warlords do most of the fighting and didn't even bother to send in reinforcements when Bin Laden was holed up in Tora Bora. Then we quickly turned our attention to Iraq, which must have really thrown Bin Laden for a loop. Vice President Cheney even implied that Saddam Hussein was somehow behind September 11 and a majority of us believe him. You can imagine how it must have irked Bin Laden to lose credit for what he claimed was his crowning achievement. And instead of cutting and running from Iraq there is no sign that we will ever be leaving there, at least anytime soon.

It appears that Bin Laden badly misjudged the United States and the Bush Administration. He believed that the rights in our Constitution would make us weak. He apparently didn't count on the ability of President Bush and the members of his administration to find ways around these "rights," to find loopholes in the Constitution that the Founding Fathers had hidden in there just for this kind of situation, the way companies sometimes insert poison pills into their stock offerings.

Perhaps Bin Laden believed that the press would have fought the Bush Administration in its attempts to go around the inconvenient portions of the Constitution. He may have believed that the press would have pointed out that the Bush Administration was changing the subject from Al Qaeda to Iraq. But for the most part the liberal media has been very well behaved, and even helpful to the Bush Administration, until recently. And he didn't realize that when some newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, finally attempted to buck the Bush Administration, a chorus of voices would cry out from Fox News, talk radio, the conservative blogosphere and the floor of Congress accusing them of treason and scaring them back into line again.

If Bin Laden thought that President Bush would be just like his father, he had another thing coming. Instead of forming alliances and securing international cooperation as his father might have, which would have weakened us by requiring us to listen to what other countries have to say, President Bush decided to go it alone. One by one he has alienated all of our allies until even a majority of the people in Great Britain believe that America is seeking world domination and that President George W Bush has "hypocritically championed democracy as a cover for the pursuit of American self-interests." I'm sure this has been a source of much confusion for Bin Laden. How can he stage terrorist attacks in other countries now that they all hate us, too?

Bin Laden probably thought that he would instill fear into the American people. But if he has access to American cable news programs he would realize that most Americans believe that there are much more frightening things than a very tall man with a beard who occasionally makes tapes that those news programs don't even bother to broadcast anymore. Americans are much more terrified of gays attempting to get married, illegal immigrants swarming over our borders, atheists trying to remove crosses from public lands, and flag burners trying to burn our flags. Compared with these villains who's afraid of Osama Bin Laden?

After September 11 many pundits said that America would never be the same again, which was true for about a week. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks our comics temporarily stopped being snarky, our pop stars stopped being shallow, the rich stopped making money, and our 15-minute celebrities stopped being scandalous for just a moment as they paused to watch their televisions. Then President Bush wisely told us that we should all go shopping. And we did. Five years after the tragedy of September 11 our comedians are still snarky, the Number One song on the Billboard charts is Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous," the rich are richer than ever, Americans are still talking thumbing through the latest issue of US Weekly to see what Paris Hilton and Star Jones are up to now and we all own more gadgets than ever before. It turns out that September 11 didn't really change that much at all. America isn't that much different than it was on September 10. September 11 was just a flesh wound.

No doubt some liberals will say that if a President Clinton or a President Kerry had failed to get Osama Bin Laden, the right-wing blogosphere would be up in arms about it instead of greeting the news that we had given up the chase with a collective yawn. However, I doubt President Clinton or President Kerry would have had the genius to realize that the best plan would be to ignore Osama Bin Laden the way President Bush has. But if liberals are really so concerned about big, bad Osama Bin Laden, perhaps they can borrow some of the detectives O.J. Simpson has hired to find his wife's "real killers." I'm sure he won't mind. But the rest of us have more important things to do. There are walls to build and Constitutional Amendments to pass. And I plan to get right to it after I finish this week's issue of US Weekly.

Jon Swift, Iraq, al Qaeda, War on Terror, Terrorism, Bush, Politics, Osama Bin Laden, Usama Bin Laden, Foreign Policy