It Worked and They Laughed

There's a lot of information out there about the death of bin Laden. Things seem to be changing rapidly. Not only about the events of the raid but also of the events leading up to May 1. So it's important to keep noting just how wrong it was for the United States to turn its attention away from killing bin Laden in the first place.

There's no doubt in my mind the death of bin Laden could have happened years ago had we not invaded Iraq. Doing so swept vital resources away from a just war in Afghanistan where the hunt for the person responsible for 9/11 had barely begun.  For no reason at all, the  Bush administration wanted to invade from the beginning.  This fixation on Iraq led America down a course of irresponsibility, lies, and a full scale war with a country that had absolutely nothing to do with September 11th.  Republicans chose Iraq over killing bin Laden.

After half a decade of war in Iraq, thousands of dead American troops, hundreds of billions of dollars, what did Republicans do in 2008 when a freshman U.S. Senator from Illinois said he would go after the person responsible for 9/11 no matter where he was hiding?  They laughed.

By the time Obama had taken office in 2009, George Bush had dismantled the CIA bin Laden unit four years prior.  Emphatically, by 2009 the effort to find bin Laden was negligent and had taken a back seat to a war of choice led by madmen whose power thrived from keeping America in a state of panic and fear.

These are important facts to note when we talk today about how the Obama administration was able to track down and kill Osama bin Laden.  There was an intelligence apparatus in place, no doubt about it.  And I don't want that to sound inconsequential.  But the administration that revamped the back-burner war in Afghanistan, personally ordered the CIA to find bin Laden, increased the amount of drone missions in two years than the previous 9 combined, and directed America's military focus back to the person responsible for 9/11 was the administration of Barack Obama.  And it worked.