3/18/2002
Remember that all our military excess of the last five months has been predicated on the mission of stamping out terrorism, most especially the particular network of terrorists responsible for the attack on us, most especially its leader. Now, observe that at no time in the thunderous bombast of the State of the Union address did Bush mention the name Osama bin Laden. We don't know where he is; we don't know if he's alive. And seemingly we don't care any more. Tom Daschle wanted to know why, which is what provoked Trent Lott and Dick Cheney to trumpet his lapse of "patriotism." Rumsfeld has been asked and he shrugs it off as disinterestedly as he shrugs off the deaths of Afghani citizens in misguided attacks. The administration seems positively bored with the great menace who attacked us.
But the question is such an obvious one. Lott slammed Daschle for questioning the conduct of the war while there are soldiers in the field--but that's exactly what Daschle was talking about. What are the soldiers doing in the field? Because we can all see they're not doing what we originally announced an intention to do. They wander further from the stated mission with every step. It's a strange victory.
We said bin Laden was our primary objective. We don't have him. We said we were out to dismantle al Qaeda. We haven't, and it is becoming more and more obvious all the time that we really can't. Then we said we were out to hunt down all terrorism--but that's patently impossible. Only eradicating humanity could reliably end terrorism. Can you imagine trying to end shoplifting? Any person in the world is a potential shoplifter. There are measures you can take, but taking up a demonstrably impossible cause will only keep you chasing your tail forever.
But of course Bush knows that--it was his purpose all along. The longer he chases his tail, the more the people love him, and the more money he gets to spend on whatever he wants, and the more we all forget that he lost the election.
Osama bin Laden has been swept under the carpet because the White House never gave a fig for him in the first place. It's no secret that we already had our plans laid for an invasion of Afghanistan, slated for mid-October, and with or without bin Laden we commenced right on schedule. This was already what this article aptly calls "a sleight-of-hand substitution of the Taliban for Al Qaeda as our mortal enemy." For the same reason, our newer campaigns continue because it suits the administration to wage them, not because the Philippines or Somalia or Colombia have squat to do with al Qaeda. We claimed to want the Taliban out for humanitarian reasons; well, nobody mourns them, and they're out, more or less, but we're not much interested in building a more humanitarian Afghanistan now. We shouted about bin Laden and al Qaeda for precisely as long as they were (sort of) plausible excuses for the war we'd already wanted--a war to secure a lot of oil. Now that the old excuse no longer has any bearing on our current operations, the administration would really rather you forget about them.