Setting up the sucker punch

As I’ve written before, I still believe the authority figures who told us earlier that Osama bin Laden is dead.  Several authoritative voices said so, around the end of 2001, and an unscripted chorus is much more likely to be spontaneous than a scripted chorus.

US forces crushed the Taliban in late fall of 2001 (except for the ones who got away, protected by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence).  US forces pounded the mountains of Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December of 2001.  Bin Laden had already been reported to suffer from a kidney ailment requiring him to be on dialysis.

Shortly after the pounding of Tora Bora, Pakistan’s military dictator, General Pervez Musharraf, told more than one news agency that he thought bin Laden was dead, either directly from the bombing or indirectly from not being able to get medical treatment.  Musharraf was in a position to know:  news reports about bin Laden’s kidney condition indicated that Pakistan had provided UBL with his medical treatment.  As the report of the 9/11 Commission makes clear (belatedly), the intelligence community is well aware that bin Laden and the Taliban were in many ways hand-in-glove with Pakistan’s ISI. 

Musharraf’s conjectures, quoted worldwide, paralleled similar guesses and statements made at the same time by both the Pentagon and the FBI.  Military and FBI press briefings strongly suggested that bin Laden was history.

Unfortunately, the White House, presumably not wishing the “war on terror” (bombing) in Afghanistan to be over that fast, frowned them down.  Bush, whose “dead or alive” gave permission to kill UBL rather than to capture him for questioning, has never shown the slightest curiosity about bin Laden since that time.

Neither Bush nor Cheney nor anyone else in the administration’s top crust has suggested that bin Laden might have been a good asset, if captured.  Nobody minding the store has speculated on whether UBL might have valuable information, if combating terrorist strikes is really the agenda here.

Neither do major media outlets.  Well-qualified intelligence analysts suggest that bin Laden is dead, but none of the Sunday-morning talking heads say so.  It’s odd:  with the administration causing loss of life and doing everything except award contracts for a Special Bin Laden-Hunting-and-Bug-Catching Machine (cost, $60M) from some company employing Dubya’s relatives, why aren’t Chris Matthews and the rest raising more questions?

Now, some prominent Democrats have adopted a campaign tactic that threatens to be self-defeating.  Kerry and some Democratic ads have been saying that Bush’s war on Iraq is a diversion from the war on terror and from the hunt for bin Laden.  They’re right about the first, wrong about the second.  The Iraq invasion is unquestionably a diversion of resources as well as a moral abomination, a point made by the 9/11 Commission report.  But Bush’s wide-open credibility gap on terrorism should not blind the Dems to realistic probabilities on bin Laden.

I don’t foresee that bin Laden will be caught in an “October surprise,” because, as said above, I don’t think he’s out there to be caught.  You don’t bounce back from renal shutdown.  But the Dems’ seizing a superficial opportunity could still turn out to be the sucker play of all time. 

“Shoot-out” is the key concept here.  Given our malleable television networks and the administration’s sneaking, it would be only too easy for Team Bush to set up, or report back on, a dramatic purported “shoot-out” somewhere in Pakistan.  In that event, I wouldn’t give much for the actuarial chances of any tall Muslim man who happened to be in the locality.  He would be represented to the American and world press, of course, as the late Osama.

That Musharraf is now making little noises about bin Laden worries me.  He very nicely went quiet about his earlier idea, while Pakistan was garlanded as our “partner against terror” and was given terror-fighting funds.  Carrot, meet stick.  Stick, meet carrot.  Recently, Musharraf changed his mind about resigning his military commission:  he’s basically Pakistan’s sole leader, with not much criticism from the Bush administration.

If this is the scenario, I feel sorry for the Pakistani troops and local villagers to be caught in a totally gratuitous “shoot-out,” somewhere in hard terrain, with no one to report accurately what happened or even to identify the dead.  And back home, the top of the Democratic ticket will be crushed by the talking heads.