Bin Laden: Did Obama ignore Bush’s role?

Should some acknowledgment go to President Bush for creating the “intelligence architecture” that led to finding the al Qaida leader?

The death of Osama bin Laden last week was a glorious day for America, said Anneke Green in WashingtonTimes.com, but “it has been a little odd to see how eager President Obama is to take credit for it.” From Obama’s first announcement of bin Laden’s death—in a speech generously sprinkled with “I”s and “me”s—to his subsequent victory lap of triumphant appearances at Ground Zero, with the Navy SEALs in Fort Campbell, Ky., and on CBS’s 60 Minutes last weekend, you’d think the president had actually stormed the compound and pulled the trigger himself. What makes the president’s first-person preening so objectionable, said Victor Davis Hanson in NationalReview.com, is that it was President Bush who began the manhunt that led to bin Laden’s eventual demise, through warrantless wiretaps and harsh interrogation at CIA sites abroad and at Guantánamo. Yet Obama has repeatedly denounced Bush’s anti-terrorism measures, and last week he barely mentioned his predecessor’s critical role in this victory over al Qaida. “If one wonders why President Bush did not attend ceremonies” at Ground Zero last week, Obama’s smug hypocrisy might have something to do with it.

Crediting Bush with bin Laden’s killing is absurd, said Andrew Sullivan in TheDailyBeast.com. The previous administration had seven long years to bring the al Qaida leader to justice, but it was so incompetent—letting bin Laden escape at Tora Bora—and so preoccupied by “the fiasco of the Iraq occupation” that it was never going to happen. Bush even said that bin Laden was “just one person’’ who wasn’t worth his time or thought. Obama, by contrast, pursued bin Laden with “superlative, careful management” and got the job done. Obama also deserves credit for making some really gutsy decisions, said Maureen Dowd in The New York Times. He could have flattened bin Laden’s compound with an airstrike, but against the advice of several aides, sent in commandos. It was “the riskiest option presented to him, but one that spared nearly all the women and children at the compound,” as well as provided proof of bin Laden’s demise. It’s hardly surprising that the petulant Bush “preferred to sulk in his Dallas tent” rather than join Obama in a show of unity at Ground Zero.

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