Obama, Not Bush, Gets Credit for bin Laden Killing

When it came to Osama bin Laden, George W. Bush was all hat and no cattle as they say in Texas.

George W. Bush talked tough about capturing bin Laden dead or alive but he spit the bit when it came to hunting the terrorist mastermind down. The former president, distracted by his obsession with Iraq, gave up the hunt for bin Laden in 2003. Thankfully, things changed with the election of a new president. In his first meeting with his new CIA director, Leon Panetta, President Obama told the director that his first priority was to bring bin Laden to justice. [See photos of the reaction to bin Laden's death.]

In his book, State of Denial, Book Woodward records the frustration of CIA operatives who were angry that then-President Bush took them off the hunt for the al Qaeda leader so they could search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that didn’t even exist. [See a slide show of six potential terrorist targets.]

In 2003, George W. Bush abandoned the search for a terrorist who was a grave threat to Americans and took up the search for WMDs which posed no threat since they only existed in Dick Cheney’s fantasies. Even though the CIA couldn’t find an WMDs, CIA Director George Tenet shamefully buckled under to the vice president and trumpeted their presence in Iraq. President Bush used a lie and the illusion of nuclear weapons in Iraq to justify the invasion in Iraq which hast cost us the lives of almost 4,000 brave Americans and added almost 2 trillion dollars to the federal budget deficit.

The same people who blame President Obama for the economy credit former president Bush for the killing of Osama. But, I don't think President Bush deserves much credit unless he was a stealth member of the elite Navy SEAL team under the orders of President Obama that killed the al Qaeda chief. But I don’t think the guy who used his dad’s clout to join the National Guard to avoid a trip to Vietnam was ready, willing and able to take on such a dangerous mission. It’s easy to start up a couple of wars when you haven’t experienced their horrors.

• See photos of reactions to Osama bin Laden's death.
• See a slide show of six potential terrorist targets.
• See photos of U.S. troops in Afghanistan.
  
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