Yeah, But…

It must be in bold print at the top of the daily talking points memo coming out of the Democratic National Committee each morning. This is an election year, and we (the DNC) need to emphasize to the American people how dangerous the world has become because the administration insists on not letting terrorists operate freely. You’ve heard the basics again and again. We’ve supposedly botched the war on terror and in the process made the nation much less safe. Just like the Wizard of Oz cautioned Dorothy and crew, “pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.” We’re supposed to forget about 9/11 and ignore the fact that plot after plot has been discovered and dismantled prior to coming to fruition. Yes, the message is that we are simply making the terrorists mad by hunting them down. Why, they most assuredly would be satisfied if we simply thanked them for pointing out to us the error of our ways on 9/11. By hunting them down, rooting them out of their caves and raining JDAMs down on their turbaned heads, we simply anger them and convince more young radicalized jihadists that strapping fifteen pounds of C-4 to their body and killing a dozen innocents is the best that life can be.

The message is that we have failed because we haven’t caught Osama Bin Laden. How can we be so inept? We haven’t caught the leader; ergo the war on terror is a failure. How then does one account for this:

#2 Captured

Or maybe this:

Convert Now or We'll Kill Ourselves

Or one of my favorites:

Another One Bites the Dust

Or this very old tidbit:

Three Year Old News

Or maybe this dodged bullet:

British Success

I’m willing to bet that the incessant drum beat of failure because we haven’t got Osama is going to be a huge mistake as voting Americans who can read, write, see, listen and think will make a distinction between the importance of capturing one, now largely emasculated, terrorist leader and the reality of thwarting terrorist plots and inexorably rolling up the network of communications, finance, logistics and operations that allow them to function.

It makes sense to examine the slow progress of netting the preachers of jihad and the leaders of a movement to embrace the Dark Ages. If we pay attention to what is really going on, we might notice that so far we’ve cleared a lot of names and faces off of that deck of playing cards that was distributed after we rolled down the highway to Baghdad. If we count coup on those who would do harm randomly for a mis-guided religious cause, we might conclude that Hezbollah took a big hit in their little kidnapping adventure against Israel. We might notice that precision-guided munitions are unannounced guests at meetings of the local al Qaeda cell. We might even acknowledge that whether or not Bin Laden is captured doesn’t have much to do with the greater vision of freeing the world from terror.

If OBL is living in a cave, increasingly isolated as his henchmen are eliminated, unable to move freely and without access to his financial resources, we really don’t need him in a cell at Gitmo where he can be the center of a media circus and the star client for an army of ACLU attorneys claiming his rights have been abridged.