From
USA Today, George W. Bush wants to make sure you know that he should get some credit for the thing he
most conspicuously did not do:
Bush said the events that led to the death of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in May began during his administration.
"The work that was done by intelligence communities during my presidency was part of putting together the puzzle that enabled us to see the full picture of how bin Laden was communicating and eventually where he was hiding," he said. "It began the day after 9/11."
I suppose Bush has a point here, in that obviously we started looking for bin Laden after 9/11, right? Except that not even that is true; bin Laden was a well-known terrorist leader long before then, and President Clinton had launched both intelligence efforts against him and military attempts to take him out—to the pointed irritation of some Republicans, as I recall. The Bush administration found themselves accused of ignoring or downplaying the threat by al Qaeda, as relayed to them by the intelligence community, until 9/11. Whether that accusation is true or not, it is certainly not true that efforts to find him began "the day after 9/11." Perhaps that was when Bush himself began to make the effort, but the American intelligence community had been attempting to find and incapacitate bin Laden and his lieutenants since long before that.
On the other hand, Bush's legacy, as Think Progress succinctly points out:
The reality, of course, is that Bush’s attempts to capture or kill bin Laden were huge failures. While it’s been well documented that the Bush administration missed an opportunity to get bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, Bush himself subsequently stated publicly that he wasn’t spending much time thinking about getting him. “I truly am not that concerned about him. I am deeply concerned about Iraq,” Bush said in 2002, “I really just don’t spend that much time on him, to be honest with you.” Bush told reporters in 2006 that hunting the al Qaeda leader was “not a top priority use of American resources.”
And in 2005, Bush shut down the CIA’s unit dedicated to finding bin Laden in order to shift resources to Iraq. “The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants,” the New York Times reported in 2006, adding that resources “had been redirected from the hunt for Mr. bin Laden to the search for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was killed last month in Iraq.”
Even after 9/11, al Qaeda seemed a secondary focus for Bush, with Iraq inexplicably being the primary focus. It was Bush that chose to divert both intelligence and military resources from terrorism to Iraq; it was Bush himself that professed those very priorities, when asked. While we certainly can all understand his attempts at self-redemption, the simple history of the Bush legacy does not support his statements.
