By Jim Hoover

Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader responsible for thousands of deaths, is dead. An eight-month-long investigation of a suspected compound deep inside Pakistan led to a plan to erase bin Laden. After Obama ordered a small Special Forces team to attack the compound, a resulting fire fight led to the killing of bin Laden and the custody of his body.

In a little more than two years with an administration that doesn’t use terrorism to stir up fear, jingoism to unite Americans, and demagoguery to marshal hatred against the opposition party, the Obama administration did what Bush the Younger couldn’t do in almost eight years.

There is the belief that bin Laden could have been caught or killed at Tora Bora, the site of a military engagement by American forces that took place in Afghanistan in December 2001, during the opening stages of the Afghan war.

Generally, the failure to apprehend or kill bin Laden at Tora Bora was attributed to lack of available forces, allowing bin Laden to slip away across the Pakistani border.

Fewer than 100 American commandos with their Afghan allies were fighting a few hundred al-Qaeda, as American jets pounded the al-Qaeda position.

A 2009 Congressional Investigation and Report strongly suggested that bin Laden could have been captured or killed in 2001 if available forces had been used.

Calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan.

Instead the US relied on air strikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden. This decision was made by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks.

This is the principal reason as to how bin Laden escaped.

It was almost as if the Bush administration wanted him to escape.

This seems like an outlandish bit of speculation, but many of us still remember the brutal partisan politics of Bush and Company, the dirty tricks of Karl Rove, and the exploitation of 9/11 by Republican principals.

Even with the Weapons-of-Mass-Destruction claim and the asserted al-Qaeda ties, Bush and his neo-conservative friends could not have justified attacking Iraq. This was possible only if bin Laden, the devil of terrorism, was free. This failure made possible Bush’s bogus war in Iraq and hundreds of thousands of innocents dead.

In addition, the Bush regime could not have used the bogeyman of terrorism throughout his two terms as president. In fact, two terms might not have been possible without the stoked fear of terrorists and terrorist alerts, feeding that fear among Americans for some seven years. The whole 2004 campaign was based on Republican superiority against terrorists.

How scared could you make Americans if Osama bin Laden was caught or dead?

The Terror-Alert Chart above was used, often citing above average threat levels. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, serving under Bush, recently asserted that the Bush White House pressured him to adjust the terror threat level for political gain. Elevated and high were used eleven times and even severe was used once, often for vague or imagined threats.

The Bush administration started out weak under the strain of the contested Florida election which saw the Supreme Court appoint Bush without a full Florida count. Fear of terrorism would give him legitimacy while Rove cultivated the swaggering “cowboy” image. Neo-conservatives wanted a reason to attack Iraq and a cause that would help the radical conservative platform of tax cuts for the rich and cuts in social programs.

Though the Bush motives and actions are circumstantial, and perhaps ascribed, they actually amount to more evidence than used to convict most poor defendants of capital crimes in American courts.

But then we will never know. No real investigations into Bush’s tawdry actions will ever be conducted. Democrats refused to do this.

The demise of bin Laden is of course important, but gauging the strength and effectiveness of terrorism by the existence of one leader rather than the motivation of recruits to jihad is wishful thinking.

Jihad is fomented by politically-inspired terrorist policy, global imperialistic presence, and unnecessary wars.

President Obama’s approach is more intelligent than Bush’s, but still carries the baggage of the Bush swagger.

Meanwhile, Obama himself cautioned against declaring the fight against terrorism to be over.

If bin Laden had been taken in 2001, perhaps many of the victims of the Bush-Obama wars would be alive and well today.