Posted 11:37 PM by steve

I think I may have stopped drinking the Bush kool-aid even before Professor Bainbridge, but I think he's wrong slam Bush for supposedly not making catching Bin Laden Job #1...

If you listen to Barnes, rather than simply accept the distorted recap of the anti-Bush group Think Progress, you'll hear Barnes say that Bush said that (if I am typing it right) "sending 100,000 Special Forces troops to the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan to hunt him (Bin Laden) down ... isn't a top priority use of American resources"... and that Bush prefers to "use tips... to break up plots... before they occur".

Well, what is so wrong with Bush's thinking on this point?

Let's start with his first assertion that sending 100,000 Special Forces troops to look for Bin Laden isn't a good use of resources. First off, I don't know the exact number (something tells me it's classified), but we probably don't have 100,000 Special Forces troops in all of our military... so sending that number into Pakistan is a non-starter. Now, setting aside the fact that they're not particularly well-suited for trekking through the mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan, were we to send in 100,000 regular infantry, given that we have a finite number of soldiers and that our military is already stretched pretty thin, where are these 100,000 personnel going to come from? It's not as if they're sitting around stateside just waiting for a mission. Committing 100,000 troops to look for Bin Laden will require them to be taken from some other, presumably important, mission. Do Bush's critics want them to be taken from helping to beat back the Taliban uprising in Afghanistan? Do they want them taken from trying to secure Iraq? Do they want them pulled from South Korea, where they serve as a deterrent against the crazy fool running North Korea? As much as we might like things to be different, the sad fact is that we don't have 100,000 infantry sitting around who can be deployed to search for Bin Laden without seriously damaging our other missions.

As for Bush's second point, that the best way to fight terror is to seek out information on terror plots so that they can be stopped, I think Bush's critics have forgotten or lost sight of the fact that most of the terror attacks in recent years haven't been driven and directed by Bin Laden himself, but rather by semi-autonomous groups which are, at most, supported and inspired by Bin Laden. I'm not under the impression that Bin Laden is sitting in his cave, with his giant map of the world on the wall, plotting out a year's worth of upcoming attacks. These groups might certainly mourn Bin Laden's death or capture, but they certainly aren't going to fold up their tent and slink away if that were to happen.

It'd be nice if we could do both, look for Bin Laden and snuff out these nascent plots. But if I had to choose between them, I would agree that Bush is putting the effort where it's likely to have the biggest payoff.

UPDATE: Confederate Yankee gets it...