Excerpt from Bryan Preston at PJ Tatler – 05/02/2011
Osama bin Laden is dead. I blame Bush.
Stories emerging about the mission that got bin Laden point very clearly that the early decision to capture and interrogate al Qaeda terrorists paid dividends in intelligence over the years. Captured terrorists broke and spilled information about details large and small, among them the name of bin Laden’s favorite personal courier. That was important because OBL’s Abbottabad compound had no phones or internet connection. He had to rely on personal messengers, and having found his, U.S. forces could find him. It is also now beyond debate that taking the fight to al Qaeda in Afghanistan was the right thing to do, and staying there enabled our forces to fly in and kill the terrorist. Had our forces not been basing in Afghanistan, they might have had no place from which to move in and get the kill.
President Bush took a great deal of criticism from many quarters, including the current president, for the decisions regarding captured terrorists. He was dubbed a “war criminal,” a designation many on the left hesitated to place on the author of 9-11 itself. But it was his decision to treat them as illegal enemy combatants, and it was a decision for which he weathered a storm of criticism. And now we know, it was a decision that set America on the course to get bin Laden.
So while President Obama rightly gets some credit for authorizing the raid, we should remember that he was a leading critic of the difficult decisions that led to the intelligence that made the raid possible. We should remember to thank the president who withstood the critics because he knew his actions were taken in America’s interests. The nation owes both our 44th and 43rd presidents our thanks today.
Personally, I’ll “blame” Bush this time, and eagerly await the movie version of the raid. It will make a perfect counterpoint to Black Hawk Down.
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