Bush is Osama's Task Monkey

I've heard this argument before, but it seems to set Republican defenders of Bush back up a step when you throw it in their face.

That argument is that Bush has been fulfilling the wishes of Osama bin Laden. Osama wanted two things;

1. U.S. out of Saudi Arabia (check)
2. Iraq to become a Islamic Theocracy (check)

They are really pissed about 2 and don't know what to make about 1 (other than we're building military bases in Iraq... when they bring that up, you can simply hammer them with the question: why did we go to war in Iraq again? to build military bases? hmmm...)

3. Recruitment up beyond his wildest dreams. According to the training videos that have been intercepted, they don't even have to bother training recruits to stay alive anymore

Bush's solution has failed: Freedom isn't on the march... but Terrorism is on the Rise!

If we were leaving why did Osama attack us?

And even if it is true, did Osama know that?

Recruitment essentially of Muslims in a holy war.

According to the recent Nat. Geographic documentary on 9/11 and Bin Laden and much of what I have read, his goal was to get the US to attack Afghanistan. He wanted to start a holy war in Afghanistan, this is one of the primary factors, I believe, that they also attempted (and succeeded) in assassinating the leader of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan on the Sunday prior to 9/11.

However, he badly mis-underestimated our ability to defeat him there as well as the overwhelming support that we would get to do the job.

The tragedy of our invasion of Iraq, is that we dropped the ball on finishing him off and sending a statement to the world of how the US would deal with such a situation in favor of a misunderstood mandate to change the world. (Not unlike General Lee in the battle of Gettysburg sending his troops against the center of the Union line because he thought they were invincible and it was God's will they would triumph.) By invading Iraq, we shifted the balance of world opinion back the other way to the point that the world is very much back to where it was before 9/11 with lots of mistrust especially of our motives and created a rallying point for extremists to focus as well as the convenient battlefield that Bin Laden was looking for.

What is somewhat interesting in this is that, it would seem, Iraq was the battlefield we were looking for all along as well(For Example, Runsfeld is noted to have wanted to attack there immediately because it had better targets) and our failure to succeed there when we chose to make it our battlefied is even more appalling, and now even Afghanistan is tipping back into open war as well, so 4 years later, what have we gained?

Sorry for the long post, most is not directed at your comment, just throwing out some thoughts, for what their worth.

"The tragedy of our invasion of Iraq, is that we dropped the ball on finishing him off and sending a statement to the world of how the US would deal with such a situation in favor of a misunderstood mandate to change the world."

Repubs like to "think" OBL has been neutralized, but when you bring up the bombings in Europe they have to pause before they say "we're fighting it over there..." then you shut them down with how open our borders our (especially the Mexican border) and they go bananas (cookoo bananas at that).

Probably not a great idea to base much on it.

Thus far, no one really has any evidence OBL was behind 9/11 or that he's still alive, apart from his confession and other recordings of his voice or videotape. Some of the recordings have proved to be sophisticated fakes according to the Guardian UK. Most other sources are cautious about not knowing when the tapes were recorded.

I did not see any obvious bias in the parts of the documentary that I saw. I've read similar things elsewhere. I have not read the magazine regularly for a while, I used to work for them in the customer service department before they outsourced it.

However, when I did read it I did not detect an obvious political bias in any of the articles that I read and quite a few writers and photographers whom I respect and admire have written for the magazine who, I feel pretty confident, don't have a RW point of view.

Are you just referring to 9/11 specifically? If so, other then this documentary and an earlier one and article about Ahmed Shah Massoud were really the only things I've seen from National Geographic about 9/11. As such, I'm not denying the bias may exist, just asking for details.

For example, the earlier documentary showed video of Shah Massoud from "a speech Massoud gave to the European Parliament in April 2001 (in the documentary I thought it was May 2001) in which the cable says he "warned the US government" about bin Laden."

The part in quotes is taken from the following CNN story:

<http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/11/06/massoud.cable/>

When I first saw that footage from National Geographic was when I first started to get a sense of outrage about about how our government let us down, particularly the Bush administration. I have never been able to find this footage on the internet or a transept of it. This is the first reference I found but it seems to corroborate Nat Geo's reporting on the issue.

Massoud was our ally against the Soviet Union when they invaded Afghanistan (Bin Laden was as well). Had he lived he would have likely been the ruler of Afghanistan today. However, when he warned the US in April we refused to listen to him because the Bush administration likely did not want to get involved in Afghanistan. At the same time Bush Administration officials were essentially at work on PNAC plans for regime-change in Iraq.

That really should be a major story on par with the DSM, the August warning that Bush ignored and all the other slew of evidence that they were not interested in al-queada despite the warnings.

The first place I learned of it was from National Geographic and have not heard much since (until I found this articles today) which is why I ask about your claims of bias.

I think this thread has new relevance:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x1735279

Repubs are all upset about Illegal Immigration, esp. from Mexico. They are using security as an excuse to purge America of mexican immigrants...

As this is the case, if we can get them on board for impeachment, let's go along with their excuse... the fact is Bush IS endangering our security... dems and repubs just see that Bush is endangering us in different ways (and some dems would agree that our borders ARE a security issue).

We're more unsafe in America now than we ever were before after 9/11 and before we turned out the illegal wars, aka global struggle against extremism and allowing immigrants to over run our borders.

It all comes down to the same point: This regime must be removed and no longer share anything but a prison cell. Propagandaists deserve justice in jail as well such as Judith Miller.