Osama bin Forgotten
Published 8:03 pm Monday, September 19, 2005
By Staff
A recent report in The New York Times suggests we are less than determined to bring Osama bin Laden to justice. How could this be?
When the United States knew he was in Tora Bora, we dispatched just 36 U.S. Special Forces troops to a region where the terrorist who attacked us four years ago on Sept. 11, 2001, had the support of an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 well-armed, well-trained men. Compare that to the almost 150,000 soldiers we unleashed on Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein.
We got Saddam, but Osama bin Forgotten.
The article in the Sunday Times magazine goes on to report that an American commander with 4,000 Marines in striking distance, Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis, asked permission to join the fight and was denied. He wasn't even directed to cordon off the area. Why?
What is this administration's priorities? What happened to wanting to capture Osama? Who do we hold accountable for these decisions?
There are a lot of crackpot theories out there, such as the administration planning 9/11.
That's nonsense, but it's still disturbing the way we seem to have moved on from the symbolic main culprit of those devastating terrorist attacks on the Pentagon in Washington and on the World Trade Center in New York City.
One cynical theory about the war on terror is that had we captured bin Laden, invading Iraq would have been harder to justify to the American people.
We hope that's not the case, that we were so determined to plunge into a war in the name of weapons of mass destruction that we let him get away intentionally. Wouldn't holding back in the pursuit of the world's most-wanted terrorist constitute treason for many Americans?