They Eat Their Young

I've really have little tolerance for the whole "Who does Al Qaeda want to win the election". But proving that good things can still rise out of the dung heap of juvenile conversational memes, the Philosoraptor uses this stinky loaf as a launching pad to sink his claws into the defenders of the Iraq war and rip them a new one.

Stunning, astounding, incredible as those failures are, they all pale in comparison to the Administration’s greatest error. Failing to decapitate al Qaeda at Tora Bora was a blunder of historical proportions, but the reason the administration failed to do so is even more astounding: they wanted to preserve our troops for an attack elsewhere. If the planned attack had been against a more dangerous enemy, then this would have been rational. But, of course, it wasn’t. Even had we allowed bin Laden to slip away merely because we didn’t want to commit enough troops, or because we didn’t want to undertake such an expensive effort, this would have merely been an act of astounding incompetence. But instead the administration withheld troops in order to strike elsewhere. And, again, if the country we ultimately attacked had merely been unconnected with bin Laden in any way, this action would have merely been tragically idiotic. But no. The Bush administration allowed bin Laden to escape so that we could attack one of bin Laden’s enemies, the man bin Laden himself called “a bad Muslim.”

Imagine bin Laden’s relief—and disbelief. To get a sense for it, I suppose you’d have to contemplate something like the following scenario: you have been wounded and cornered, without hope of escape, by a ravenous tiger. You see it approach your for the kill…but, as you prepare to make peace with your maker, the tiger not only turns and runs away, but runs into the next county and eats somebody you really hate. Greater good fortune bin Laden could not have imagined. But, of course, there’s more. Incredibly, we have yet even to mention the worst of it. Not only did the Bush administration let bin Laden escape, not only did they attack and depose his great enemy, not only did they alienate our allies and anger the rest of the world, but on top of it all they galvanized the Muslim world against us and created a recruiting goldmine for al Qaeda. Greater incompetence and a more resounding failure can hardly be imagined.

. . .

If we look back — or if bin Laden were to look back — to where we all stood on September 12th 2001, looking forward to 2004, what we would see would be a spectrum of possibilities, some better for us, some better for bin Laden. But from that perspective, a reasonable person would have predicted that the real possibilities ranged from a total victory for the U.S. to — just possibly, and on the worst end of the spectrum of possibilities — a more limited victory, with al Qaeda more-or-less intact, but badly wounded. I doubt that any reasonable person could have predicted that 2004 would find bin Laden still at large, al Qaeda largely intact and deluged with recruits, our allies resentful and distant, and America deeply divided. And this is not yet even to mention the fact that polls show that most Iraqis see us as occupiers rather than liberators, and that picture and videotapes showing torture of Iraqi prisoners by American troops are almost guaranteed to make that situation worse.

He forgets to mention that we were also played for fools by Iranian intelligence, but really, that's just icing on the cake.

Update: If you think I'm too harsh on the morons spinning the "Al Qaeda wants Kerry to win in November", read this pile of trash (via Atrios)

[Kelli] ARENA: Neither John Kerry nor the president has said troops pulled out of Iraq any time soon. But there is some speculation that al Qaeda believes it has a better chance of winning in Iraq if John Kerry is in the White House.

BEN VENZKE, INTELCENTER: Al Qaeda feels that Bush is, even despite casualties, right or wrong for staying there is going to stay much longer than possibly what they might hope a Democratic administration would.

Just two words for all these morons: Bite Me