WSJ's Al Hunt: Bagging Bin Laden

[question everything]

July 15, 2004; Page A11

Isnip)

Near the top of this GOP wish list is eliminating Osama bin Laden. Last week, The New Republic reported the administration has demanded the Pakistani government get bin Laden before the election, preferably during the Democratic convention this month; the story was officially denied but had a ring of authenticity. A Bush re-election hinges on a majority of Americans seeing him as a tough commander in chief winning the war on terrorism, whatever the temporary travails in Iraq. These Republicans think, or at least hope, that getting bin Laden, especially if the president can argue simultaneously that may have thwarted an attack on America, could do the trick.

(snip)

Dick Clarke believes that apprehending bin Laden "won't make a hell of a lot of difference at this point." As the former anti-terrorism chief for Presidents Clinton and Bush, nobody knows al Qaeda better. Osama, he says, "is pretty much a figurehead now." Indeed, he thinks bin Laden could be more lethal as a martyr than as a recluse in hiding. "Think Che Guevera," he notes citing the Cuban Marxist leader who became a larger-than-life poster boy for guerrilla movements after he was killed.

(snip)

There was a serious shot at killing the top al-Qaeda leaders in 2001, when they were trapped in the mountainous Afghanistan-Pakistan border region of Tora Bora; but in a huge blunder, the Americans, with insufficient forces, sent Afghans to do the job and bin Laden and the others escaped. "It might have made more of a difference if we'd gotten him then," suggests Mr. Clarke. That he has been able to elude the powerful United States for three years has become part of the terrorist network folklore.

(snip)

That's a great success if the terrorist threat chiefly centers on al Qaeda as a global network run by bin Laden. But that's not the case, says Jason Burke, a British journalist who has written a highly praised book on al Qaeda. Instead, he says it is "a small group of hardened militants who came together in Afghanistan in the late '90s under the leadership of bin Laden, ran a number of training camps there and managed to commission and execute a series of attacks culminating in September 11th." That al Qaeda, he adds, was shattered by the U.S. "is largely peripheral in terms of modern Islamic terror."

(snip)

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[jbfam4]

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