Failing to get Bin Laden

Sure, Jesse Jackson says it's all Bush's fault that we "allowed" bin Laden to escape at Tora Bora by "outsourcing" the job to local warlords. The then CENTCOM commander Tommy Franks disagrees, saying our strategy was correct. I'll defer to General Franks on that one, but as Dick Morris points out in today's column, bin Laden should have been long since relegated to the annals of history by the time we invaded Afghanistan. (But hey, Clinton balanced the budget.)

• Our first shot at bin Laden came in Feb. 13, 1998, when President Bill Clinton's aides scuttled a CIA plot that had been eight months in the planning to kidnap Osama, using local Afghan tribesmen and to ferry him to the United States to stand trial.

• The second chance came when we actually did launch cruise missiles to kill bin Laden on Aug. 20, 1998. (Apparently, if he died in an air strike that would not be an assassination). Clinton ordered the hit, but instructed that the Pakistani Army Chief of Staff be briefed right before the missiles overflew his air space so he would not think them to be Indian and order retaliation. Word leaked from Pakistan to bin Laden, who escaped right before the missiles hit.

• The final missed opportunity came in May, 1999 when the CIA reported that bin Laden would be in Kandahar, Afghanistan for five days. The 9/11 Commission reported: "If this intelligence was not 'actionable,' working-level officials said at the time and today, it was hard for them to imagine how any intelligence . . . could meet that standard."

• When one contemplates who would wage the more determined War on Terror, we must remember the tentative and hesitant way the Clinton people waged it — always bowing to global public opinion and political concerns rather than taking forthright and bold action.

  Under Bush, bin Laden has been reduced to sending in impotent tapes and wild threats. Under Kerry, the same geniuses that let him escape three times will be back in charge running things.