C'mon, Peter

Washing yourself in the blood, eh, Mr. Feaver?

Indeed, the single greatest and undeniable foreign policy achievement of the Obama Administration -- tracking and successfully targeting Bin Laden -- came not because Obama reversed course from the previous Administration but because he stayed the course.

Um. You mean like how under Bush, the CIA disbanded the unit looking for bin Laden and under Obama it was the agency's top priority? I truly never want to have you in the car when I need a map read.

 

Comments

[mikey]

Honestly.

Do they think they can revise history this soon after the fact?

HEY!

We were THERE!!

And the larger question, do they really think they can somehow rehabilitate Bush/Cheney, the single worst American Presidency by any measure at least since the civil war? What, do they hope that someday, if they work hard enough, people will merely believe GW Bush was mediocre?

[Eli Lake]

I don't know Spencer. That seems like a stretch. Under Clinton there was a small unit, Alec Station, looking for bin Laden. It was hardly a huge priority. In early 2001 he dismantled it. But then after 9-11 Bush devotes massive resources in the secret bureaucracy to finding bin Laden. Do you deny that the drone initiative, the intelligence unilateralism in Pakistan and the reform of JSOC all start under Bush?I give Obama the credit for making a gutsy call here. But Feaver's point stands that he could not have done it without the institutions rebuilt under Bush.

[Geoff]

It's a pretty dishonest and/or clueless claim that Bush disbanded the CIA unit looking for bin Laden as being relevant to the pursuit of him.

The bin Laden unit from the 1990s was disbanded because large parts of the intel and defense sectors were now devoted to attacking al Qaeda and they superceeded the need for some little understaffed office.

At the time of 9/11, it was a tiny office compared to just the CTC. I'll give you 3 guesses as to what the CTC's focus was on Sept 12th. The bin Laden unit got shut down for the same reason the 50-man space travel agency did the day they opened NASA. Use your head.