Read Between the Lines

We have reached a point in America where we all seem to read without comprehending. We don't seem to notice that we are being sound-bited and fed assumptions which are often without basis and driven by a political agenda. In short order we are spouting meaningless slogans at each other as a substitute for understanding. Here's a good example:

Bin Laden Could Have Been Nabbed

In classic Monday morning quarterbacking we get a Senate committee reporting that the world would be so much different today if we had simply blocked Bin Laden's escape from Tora Bora to Pakistan in December of 2001.

Imagine, only three short months after 9/11 we could have ended the problem. Did you apply an overlay that President Bush screwed the pooch on this?

But step back a bit and examine the premises of the committee report. Does the fact that it was initiated by Sen. John Kerry indicate an agenda? Did we really have a fix on OBL and could the 100 Special Forces troops on the ground really have blocked the territory between Tora Bora and Pakistan? Maybe you simply accepted the report statement that there were "thousands" in place to handle the job?

Yes, it is our crack, non-combatant Senators who now eight years later are able to conclusively tell us where Bin Laden was, what we should have done, and how badly President Bush and SecDef Rumsfeld bungled the job.

Now if you want to really reach for conclusions, try this one from the Senate report as it was covered in the Dallas Morning News today:

“Removing the al-Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the committee’s report concludes. “But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”

Do they notice that the "potent symbolic figure" has been off of the world stage for the last five years. His total "leadership" role has been to release a videotape about every eight months to quell rumors that he is dead from kidney failure. Where is the PayPal account that receives this "steady flow of money" and how do the Senators link OBL to any sort of fund-raising program. Maybe even a tougher question is how inspirational is it to be forced to live in a cave eating roots and sucking on damp rocks for liquid while showing your face anywhere will result in immediate death or capture?

Might it not be more obvious to examine the madrassas and imams around the world and within our borders running blogs and webpages encouraging jihad and terrorism and against America?

The protracted war on terror would still be going on with or without the capture of OBL. We've rolled up most of the senior leadership and decimated the ranks of potential replacement leaders. The organization of al-Qaeda is dispersed and isolated with little coherence but still with potential to do damage. For the Senate to empanel a commission of self-professed experts to try to deflect blame for anything which exists today away from themselves and their half-hearted policy-making waffling is nothing short of ludicrous. Much might have been done differently, but the war today is what we have and the future is where the action needs to be.