We don't have to guess Bush's priorities, we can simply look at where he allocates finite resources. Clearly he considers Iraq and Saddam a couple of orders of magnitude more important than Afghanistan, Al Qaida, and bin Laden. I'm not alone in questioning his priorities.

The root premise of this whole thing, which is that somehow Bush could have "selected" when bin Laden was captured, is where you start to get into the looney zone.

That may be the root premise you'd prefer to argue against, but it's not mine. This thread is about playing political games with national security, and the reports that, now that election season is here, Bush and his envoys are suddenly putting pressure on Pakistan to produce an "HVT" on a timetable whose cutoff date is the November election. It's far from a matter of them choosing their time--hell, that would be evidence of competency, and I don't expect that. It's about suddenly remembering bin Laden and al Qaida when it's politically opportune to do so.

How many people are idiotic enough to believe that if we had caught bin Laden in 2001 that the entire anti-American terror movement would have folded up? That Zarqawi would be working at a 7-11 today?

You should doublecheck the Republican talking points. bin Laden is the devil incarnate and personally represents a grave threat to American security. He's a busy little terrorist mastermind if you count his appearances in Administration rhetoric--he's wheeling and dealing with Saddam one day, blowing up discos in the Pacific the next, directing his army of agents to infiltrate America's shopping malls and office buildings, holding fundraisers all over the world, blowing up trains in Spain, making videos, and lurking under every bed when he's not working.

Are you trying to say that the Administration's been exaggering bin Laden's importance? I'm shocked!

I'd bet a month's pay that if we had nailed bin Laden last year instead, all of you would be yelling, "So where's Saddam?

How could we have captured him? Last year Bush was obsessed with Saddam and didn't have the attention span or resources to think about bin Laden.

And that's the problem: Foolishly misplaced priorities. I really don't care as much about Saddam as bin Laden, because it was bin Laden who attacked America. Not Saddam (and who cares whether he dreamed about it at night as he fell asleep--he didn't act on his desires). The two are far from equal in importance to American interests--do all Arabs look alike to Bush and his loyalists? Is punishing Saddam a sufficient substitute for punishing bin Laden?