At the Huffington Post, Cenk Uygur says the unsayable:

Did We Let Osama Get Away on Purpose?

The New York Times reported this weekend that we sent in 36 U.S. Special Forces troops to get Osama bin Laden when we knew he was in Tora Bora.

... The piece in the Sunday New York Times Magazine also says there was an American commander with 4,000 marines standing by within striking distance. Brig. Gen. James N. Mattis requested permission to join the fight. He was denied.

...Osama had about 1,500-2,000 well-armed, well-trained men in the region. 36 guys to get 2,000? Why would we let ourselves be outgunned like that? ...

I am not a conspiracy theorist and I don’t believe in crazy talk about how the administration planned 9/11. You don’t have to believe any of that to understand that our priorities were grossly out of order....

"On purpose"? That seems like a stretch. And yet....

We know that, for the administration, going to war with Afghanistan was a little bit like getting large amounts of federal aid to victims of Katrina -- it seems to have been done reluctantly, to placate pesky ordinary citizens (in the case of 9/11, what the pesky citizens were demanding was that the response be aimed in the general direction of the actual killers of fellow pesky citizens). From Richard Clarke we know that many in the administration thought Afghanistan was a sideshow, an annoying distraction from the real war, which was with Saddam:

After the president returned to the White House on Sept. 11, he and his top advisers, including Clarke, began holding meetings about how to respond and retaliate....

"Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq," Clarke said.... "And we all said ... no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren't any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq...."

"The president dragged me into a room with a couple of other people, shut the door, and said, 'I want you to find whether Iraq did this.' Now he never said, 'Make it up.' But the entire conversation left me in absolutely no doubt that George Bush wanted me to come back with a report that said Iraq did this...."

We also know, from Clarke and others, why this was the case -- the belief was widespread in the Bush White House that terrorists weren't as important as their (real or imagined) state sponsors:

...The extent of [terrorism "expert" Laurie] Mylroie's influence is shown in the new book Against All Enemies, by the veteran counterterrorism official Richard Clarke, in which he recounts a senior-level meeting on terrorism months before September 11. During that meeting Clarke quotes Wolfowitz as saying: "You give Bin Laden too much credit. He could not do all these things like the 1993 attack on New York, not without a state sponsor. Just because FBI and CIA have failed to find the linkages does not mean they don't exist." ...

So maybe the Bushies didn't let bin Laden go on purpose so much as assume that it wasn't all that important to get him -- after all, he'd be powerless without the backing of a state (secondarily Afghanistan, but primarily Iraq).

Uygur adds this:

A caller on our radio show posited that if we had caught Osama, then it would have been harder to justify an invasion of Iraq. At that point, it would have seemed like we got our man and the mission was accomplished. That’s the best guess I’ve heard so far.

And, of course, we know that NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reported this in 2004 about counterterrorist activity that also might have undermined the case for an Iraq war:

NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had [three] chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill [Abu Musab] Zarqawi himself -- but never pulled the trigger....

I'd like to think the administration couldn't possibly be that cynical about Zarqawi or bin Laden -- but if you don't think terrorists themselves really matter, if you think it's all about state sponsorship (and Iraqi state sponsorship in particular), maybe it's not cynicism at all. Maybe it's just monomania and dogged adherence to a crackpot theory.

Oh, and today's New York Times reports this:

Senior Pentagon and military officials are discussing a proposal to cut American troop levels in Afghanistan next spring, perhaps by as much as 20 percent, the largest withdrawal since the Taliban were ousted in late 2001....

Although [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld emphasized that American troops would continue to handle the counterinsurgency mission "for a time," he said NATO should consider deploying troops to the eastern border region, which the United States oversees and where much of the fighting is occurring. He added that "over time, it would be nice if NATO developed counterterrorism capabilities, which don't exist at the present time."...

The eastern border is, of course, the border with Pakistan -- so this means the administration is looking to reduce the forces committed to the area where, as everyone on the planet knows, bin Laden sits pretty. So I guess they really don't give a damn whether he's caught or not.