David has already hit on this point. But of course the Bush administration foreign policy team doesn’t like President Obama focusing on the commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden. It was Bush administration policy for seven years to de-prioritize the search for Osama bin Laden. That happened at Tora Bora to refocus the fight to Iraq and Saddam Hussein. And it continued that way through early 2009. The Bush foreign policy team never saw non-state actors like bin Laden as the core threat. It was states like Iraq, Iran, Syria and North Korea where they identified the true threat.
This is why Romney said that hunting down bin Laden shouldn’t be the focus of our policy back in 2007 — because that was Bush administration policy. And in 2007, President Bush was the head of the Republican party.
It’s not only the go-ahead that President Obama gave to launch the commando raid one year ago — it was the aggressive refocus on hunting down OBL that he launched on coming to office. These are uncomfortable facts but facts nonetheless.
If Don Rumsfeld would have kept his eye on the ball — hunting down bin Laden — ten years ago in the assault on Tora Bora, there would have been no assault to order one year ago.
