RANDOM THOUGHTS

GEORGE W. BUSH, PAKISTAN AND OSAMA BIN LADEN


In light of the latest news that some sort of peace accord has been signed that implicitly gives bin Laden and the Taliban a Get Out of Jail Free card in Pakistan (more below), I thought I'd take a quick trip down memory lane and revisit some of my old favorites as we chronicle the up-and-down relationship between Bush and bin Laden.

We start, appropriately enough, at a beginning of sorts. Just six days after September 11, 2001, Bush said Bush said, "I want justice. And there's an old poster out West… I recall, that said, 'Wanted, Dead or Alive.'"

The cowboy Bush was out in force that day. But sometime in the next six months, that cowboy lost his way. "So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, to be honest with you." Bush made this comment March 13, 2002.

In the days following 9/11 Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and made the claim that you're either wit us or you're agin us, or something else more grammatically correct. On Tuesday, he reiterated that sentiment when he said, "America makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror, and those that harbor and support them, because they're equally guilty of murder."

Also on Tuesday, Bush was quoting the man he doesn't spend that much time thinking about
in order to drum up support for the war in Iraq. (Osama may actually be the very definition of "friends with benefits." Bush doesn't call him all that often, but when the cowboy needs "a hookup" well then Osama is there ready to provide. What a whore...)

Now comes the latest news from ABC News Blog:

Osama bin Laden, America's most wanted man, will not face capture in Pakistan if he agrees to lead a "peaceful life," Pakistani officials tell ABC News. The surprising announcement comes as Pakistani army officials announced they were pulling their troops out of the North Waziristan region as part of a "peace deal" with the Taliban.
If he is in Pakistan, bin Laden "would not be taken into custody," Major General Shaukat Sultan Khan told ABC News in a telephone interview, "as long as one is being like a peaceful citizen."
Bin Laden is believed to be hiding somewhere in the tribal areas of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border, but U.S. officials say his precise location is unknown. In addition to the pullout of Pakistani troops, the "peace agreement" between Pakistan and the Taliban also provides for the Pakistani army to return captured Taliban weapons and prisoners.

I'm curious to see what Bush's response to this is going to be when he has another of his rare press conferences. It is there when he is at his most flustered and though I'm certain that he'll be properly prepped for the question, he will inevitably fall off the wagon, so to speak, and ramble on about Pakistan being a good ally in the "war on terror" even though they've totally given up the hunt for Osama, assuming any actual hunt was ever actually on in the first place. To me, this whole thing was and is a farce. Pakistani "President" Pervez Musharraf never had the kind of political clout needed to go after the man that is so beloved by so many in the region. It would more than likely been political (if not actual) suicide to do so. Pakistan just stopped pretending anymore, much like the U.S. did when it shut down the CIA's bin Laden task force at the end of 2005.

It's completely obvious to anyone with a pulse and half a brain that it was never Bush's intention to capture bin Laden. Clearly, the man is much more effective to Bush as a live boogeyman than a dead regular man. On the flip side, it is my opinion that Osama has nothing but love, in an admittedly twisted sort of way, for George W. Bush. They have a truly symbiotic relationship. Both men feed into the other's greatest desires; for Bush (and his group), it's to accumulate more power. For bin Laden, it's to foment more chaos.
Bin Laden unleashed the ultimate chaos by destroying the seeming invincibility of the American homeland, which led to more power for Bush to battle this chaos. Bush used this power but had no actual plan to combat the chaos and thus, more chaos was born. One begats the other begats the other. It's like watching two cobras in a mating dance. They circle around each other, hypnotic in their movements, but deadly to any who happens to get too close.

So now, Bush's close ally in the "war on terror" has all but given Osama a pass. While they claim that Osama would be arrested if he happens to be, I don't know, walking down a street in Islamabad singing Christmas carols, there will no further effort to "smoke him out." Will Bush continue to not make a distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who harbor them? Where does Pakistan fall on the scale of "wit us or agin us"?