Mr. Moderate

I am all for being against terrorism. Particularly religiously-inspired terrorism. But it sure seems to me that our government has seen fit to selectively ignore some terrorists for present or future political gain. For instance, the date picked for triggering the Oklahoma City bombing was the second anniversary of the violent end to the Waco siege. It is clear that the two events were linked. And another disturbing link was the inspiration drawn from The Turner Diaries, a fictional novel that described a similar bombing. There is little doubt in my mind that the Oklahoma City bombing was inspired by anti-Semitic hate groups with a strong religious motivation. Nonetheless, the US government has refused to adequately investigate any links from the immediate perpetrators to the religious hate groups which obviously supported them, and which gave them their inspiration. Why?

And of course, there is the ever-baffling mystery of why President Bush only sent about 15,000 soldiers after Osama bin Laden, the chief perpetrator of the September 11th attacks, while committing ten times that number to sit on the border of Iraq, waiting for orders to invade. The net result is that there were too few US troops to successfully capture Osama bin Laden, and bin Laden remains at large today (April 30, 2007).

I’m sorry, but I cannot help but believe that President Bush deliberately let Osama bin Laden get away. And this is not just my personal belief, but a belief shared by the head of the task force assigned to “get” bin Laden. It seems that “somebody” very high in the government always vetoed any operations that might have succeeded in putting an end to bin Laden. Why?

Politics can be a game of fooling voters into voting for you in spite of what the voters ought to know about you. President Bush was playing for control of Congress in the 2002 elections, and he needed a bogeyman. Osama bin Laden was worth far more to President Bush as a live threat against the United States than he would have been worth as a captured or killed ex-terrorist leader. So, I believe that Bush had those missions to get bin Laden aborted before they could succeed because Bush needed a bogeyman to frighten the US voters into voting for his party and (in the 2004 elections) himself.

Unfortunately for President Bush, that same continued strategy didn’t carry over to the 2006 election cycle. It seems that the voters were more angry about a botched war in Iraq than they were scared of bin Laden and his cronies continuing to plot.

But be that as it may, Bush’s bogeyman is still out there plotting against the interests of the United States. And the one person most to blame for bin Laden’s continued existence as a threat to the United States is President Bush himself.