I can’t help but think that for some time now US forces have had an excellent idea of where OBL has been hiding out and they have held off from killing or capturing him because it is to our greater advantage to just let sleeping dogs lie. I also think that this knowledge is the Bush administration’s ace in the hole. If the going ever got really, really tough – like, say, GWB was about to get impeached – they would pull it out to achieve one big, turbo-charged boost of popularity to save their asses.
Well, for better or for worse Bush has never needed to play his ace, but his presidency is certainly winding down with a slow pathetic wimper. Meanwhile, there is a very strong possibility that GWB’s successor will be a Democrat, not a member of his own party.
I think Bush will play his ace card, and play it just before the game is over and when it can do him the most good – a week or so before the presidential election. With OBL killed or captured his administration will end on a huge high note, and that good glow will be generously shared with the McCain-Palin ticket. Obama will be given absolutely none of it by the White House info/media/imagery/spin gatekeepers. Fence-sitters will vote for the GOP as some warped-minded act of gratitude or gesture of validation for “Good Ol’ George” and a beholden-to-Bush McCain will be swept into ofice.
Of course, with only a handful of days before the election there will be no time to find out for sure if Bush had known the whereabouts of OBL long before he was killed/captured. If/when the truth ever does come out, some paper-thin rationale will be put forward to justify the remarkable timing. The GOP faithful will not care anyway, Bush will be in retirement in Texas (or wherever Laura wants), and the Dems will be banished to another four years of grumbling in the wilderness.
Call me a cynic, but that’s what I think will happen.
Personally I can’t give this idea anything but a :rolleyes:. I’m sure people were posting this same thing four years ago and it didn’t happen then either.
No way in hell is Bush competent enough as a leader to pull off a tactic like this. And I’m not sure it would work, anyway. His approval is so low, I doubt people are going to thank the GOP, as opposed to the military itself, for finally finding Osama.
You may be misoverestimating the extent to which GWB cares about a McCain victory or the Republican party’s future fortunes.
One thing to focus on is that it’s widely believed that OBL may be hiding in the Pakistan N.W. Frontier. The Admin. is convinced they need the Pakistani gov’t inside the tent in the G.W.O.T., and probably this is true, given that they’re nuclear armed.
There’s a limit to how much Pakistan can be pressed – they very clearly do not control the ground in the Frontier, can’t control it, and would only be embarrassed and uncooperative if the U.S. pressed them on this or kept calling attention to it.
Nor, for domestic political reasons, and intra-Muslim reasons, can they allow the U.S. to turn the Frontier into a free-fire zone with its superior force (not that there’s any guarantee this would be easy – the U.S. has carte blanche in Afghanistan and is hardly finding that to be a cakewalk). At most, Pakistan may be turning a blind eye if the U.S. discreetly funnels a few covert special ops. teams into the Frontier. So, things go slowly in their hunt.
Well, I’ve been drinking tonight so i’m not really on the ball right now, but that would take a stroke of master supervillainy. Here’s why:
You’d have to have Bin Laden captured RIGHT NOW. Planning a mission to capture him, even if Bush and Company knew where he was at the moment includes the possibility of failure. If you fail, you end up looking like even bigger idiots than most republicans are already.
trying to capture him to fit in with the elections? Too many people would be involved to keep it a secret. I don’t mean just the guys that go in shoot em up and catch him, but the people running the op. It could be just one lowly lt. or even a corporal that says “Hey, this is BS, I’m calling Sixty Minutes”.
Of course I could be wrong. As i said, I’ve had a few beers tonight, so I’m not on top ofmy thoughts right now.
It’s been pretty obvious for many years now that Bush simply isn’t and never was the least bit interested in capturing OBL. If anything, he’s more apathetic than ever since OBL is largely a has-been at this point and there are much greater threats on the horizon.
In any case, I doubt he gives a damn whether or not McCain wins. What’s in it for him? Somehow, I don’t see an uninspiring 72-year-old whose allegiances change with the wind being of any benefit to Bush’s post-presidency career.
Why do you think this is true? Why wouldn’t Bush do it earlier if he could do it? He barely won in 2004, do you think he was just so sure that voter-fraud would ensure him the election? Why didn’t he do it before the midterm elections where the Republicans lost control of Congress? That cost him any chance pursue his legislative agenda and do the things he said he wanted to do.
Why would he be afraid of impeachment? It hasn’t been a seriously considered possibility at any point in his entire term. He realizes this, even if you don’t.
Why do you think he could capture him at any time? If, somehow the military had located OBL and Bush told them to forebear capturing him until he gave the say so, what makes you think that they’d still be able to do it weeks, months, or years later?
Bush has so very little to gain from this plan, even if it were possible. He already lost what he seems (to me) to want most: to be remembered as a powerful president who successfully fought and defeated the Forces of Evil. OBL would have been the highest achievement of his presidency. And his potential losses would be enormous. To successfully isolate and capture OBL and then keep it a secret, he’d need the full cooperation of a lot of military leaders who stand to lose a lot by not capturing him. If you were a General who caught Osama, would you be excited about the idea of keeping him on ice and giving up your rightful status of national hero, all to provide questionable political insurance? Would everyone else who was also involved? What do they have to gain?
I think this is probably false. Good for you, this is completely unfalsifiable, and I’m sure you’ll have a way to wiggle out of this idea when Bush leaves office without springing Osama Bin Laden at the last minute to preserve the election.
I think W’s popularity may have dropped below a point of no return. Further, the closer it is to the election, the more it looks like they put it off that long for their own purposes. If they wait until October to take him, no one will believe that they couldn’t have taken him three years ago, & the thoughtful will conclude that Bushco are afraid of learning to deal with a post-Osama al-Qaeda/Islamic Jihad, preferring to let Obama face that uncertain new paradigm.
They definitely were. I don’t think I was one of them (though I could be wrong), but I certainly thought that if Bush could do it, I wouldn’t have put it past him to actually do it.
I doubt that capturing bin Laden has gotten substantially easier in four years. For that reason if for no other, I’m not worried about that sort of October surprise.
OTOH, another election-eve rant from bin Laden wouldn’t surprise me in the least. he needs the U.S. to continue to act badly enough to keep at least some Muslims interested in his brand of extremism - otherwise he’s a nobody in a cave.
We still need to take the fucker out, though, even if he becomes a nobody: when you’re President, and someone does something like that to your fellow citizens, you need to take them down, just to show you won’t be trifled with. I’ve drawn the analogy before to Humphrey Bogart’s speech about his partner at the end of The Maltese Falcon, and I haven’t changed my mind about that.
Sure, but how does that translate to victory for McCain? Wouldn’t the people most affected by OBL’s capture have been very likely to vote for him anyway?
It would have worked better in 2004 than it would now. Back then Bush was being attacked for running an incompetent war. If he caught OBL then, he could have argued that everything was going according to plan. It would have taken away one of Kerry’s biggest attacks, that Bush hasn’t even caught the man who caused 9/11.
In this year, McCain is no George Bush when it comes to competence. We can all agree that McCain would have done a much job in conducting foreign policy. What is hurting McCain is Bush’s conservative policies that have been shown to be complete failures, e.i., torture, abstinence, tax cuts, curtailing civil liberties, and nation building.
His gross incompetence is just the icing on the cake, and doesn’t really equate with conservatism. When people say McSame, they don’t mean McCain will embrace Bush’s incompetence. They are just talking about failed ideology.
So Bush capturing OBL will show that he isn’t a complete retard, but it won’t help McCain because it doesn’t prove that a particular conservative ideology is correct.
I don’t know. What do you mean by “people most affected by OBL’s capture”?
As far as translating into a McCain victory, I agree that it wouldn’t necessarily do so. Personally, I believe that an awful lot of people would break it down to simply “republicans captured osama, republicans = good”, however. Maybe rather than naive, I’d just say you have more faith in the voters than I do. Believe me though, I would be very happy if I discovered that I was wrong about that.
A huge deal = they would alter or affirm their views based on it.
I wasn’t asking that to be a dick, I just don’t know what you meant. I don’t know of many people that would be personally effected by the capture of OBL in any way. That doesn’t mean they wouldn’t think it was important.
Okay, but the connection between that and increased voting for McCain remains vague, hence I don’t see it as a pre-election ploy of any proven value. Sure, there’d be some cheering and such, much like immediately after the “We got him!” statement from Iraq. The current administration has expressed indifference about OBL. Can they suddenly get interested enough for voters who otherwise would’ve gone Obama or stayed home to follow suit?
In order for Bush to produce Bin Laden just before an election you would need to believe that Bush has the intelligence, inclination and total control of hundreds of civil servant operatives sworn to secrecy. That’s so ridiculous a notion I’m surprised that anyone could take it seriously.