If we go back four years and two months we learn:
Osama bin Laden and his chief lieutenants, operating from hideouts suspected to be along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, are directing a Qaeda effort to launch an attack in the United States sometime this year, senior Bush administration officials said on Thursday.
”What we know about this most recent information is that it is being directed from the senior most levels of the Al Qaeda organization,” said a senior official at a briefing for reporters. He added, ”We know that this leadership continues to operate along the border area between Afghanistan and Pakistan.”
Counterterrorism officials have said for weeks that they are increasingly worried by a continuing stream of intelligence suggesting that Al Qaeda wanted to carry out a significant terror attack on United States soil this year. But until the comments of the senior administration officials on Thursday, it was not clear that Mr. bin Laden and top deputies like Ayman Zawahiri were responsible for the concern.
Another senior administration official said on Thursday that the intelligence reports — apparently drawn partly from interviews with captured Qaeda members and partly from other intelligence — referred to efforts ”to inflict catastrophic effects” before the election.
The article reports that the nature of the threat was “unspecific” leading me to believe that it never got much past the wishing stage. For some reason or another. Still, it’s incredible that there was no such chatter this year. Was there?
And we if we go back to right before the election we recall that Osama bin Laden made a rather specific threat.
The Islamist website Al-Qal’a explained what this sentence meant: “This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately. When he [Osama Bin Laden] said, ‘Every state will be determining its own security, and will be responsible for its choice,’ it means that any U.S. state that will choose to vote for the white thug Bush as president has chosen to fight us, and we will consider it our enemy, and any state that will vote against Bush has chosen to make peace with us, and we will not characterize it as an enemy. By this characterization, Sheikh Osama wants to drive a wedge in the American body, to weaken it, and he wants to divide the American people itself between enemies of Islam and the Muslims, and those who fight for us, so that he doesn’t treat all American people as if they’re the same. This letter will have great implications inside the American society, part of which are connected to the American elections, and part of which are connected to what will come after the elections.” [3]
Apparently, unable to strike before the elections, Bin Laden attempted to bully the American electorate into voting for John Kerry. It likely didn’t have any effect. But still remember he made a threat and never carried it out.
Jonathan Spyer has more as to what has happened to Al Qaeda since 9/11.
Al-Qaida has combined sometimes nightmarishly effective tactical ability with a somewhat other-worldly, incoherent political and strategic program. Political Islam is transforming the politics of the Middle East, and represents a key strategic challenge to the west. But the particular version of it represented by the perpetrators of 9/11 is today more of a murderous side-show than the nerve center of the future Caliphate which it likes to imagine itself.
Al Qaeda, Spyer reports, has been effective in getting its message out to like minded organizations, but operationally it has suffered numerous setback over the past seven years.
Abe Greenwald summarizes some of these losses:
Every criticism of President Bush’s national security record begins rightly with the charge that Osama bin Laden has not been captured or confirmed dead. Any honest defense of Bush must reckon with this fact. The story goes that in 2003 U.S. forces abandoned the hunt for bin Laden in eastern Afghanistan and shifted their focus onto Iraq, giving the al Qaeda leader a free pass so that we could take up arms against a regime unconnected to the attacks of September 11. Let’s put aside the fact that this is a false choice. And let’s put aside questions about the claim’s legitimacy regarding timelines, intelligence agencies, roaming fighters, Iraq’s terrorist ties, and the dynamics of force deployment, and simply accept the accusation at its most damning. To wit: Bush lost bin Laden by going into Iraq. Okay: If I were offered the choice of taking out one al Qaeda mastermind who had recently been reduced to the status of cave-dwelling spoken-word artist or more than a thousand senior al Qaeda operatives and tens of thousands of armed Islamist soldiers, I would choose the latter a thousand out of a thousand times.
And the proof is in the pudding. Consider the decimated state of al Qaeda and related organizations since they’ve come up against overwhelming American force in Iraq. As CIA director Michael Hayden recently put it, we’ve seen “Near strategic defeat of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qaeda globally.” Would the hunt for one man in the caves of Afghanistan and Pakistan have yielded better results?
While Al Qaeda remains a force to be reckoned with, it cannot act as it did seven years ago. This means that whatever mistakes President Bush has made along the way, he has succeeded in the big picture. Will whoever succeeds him take the calm we have experienced over the past seven years for granted and relax his vigilance or will he remain committed to keeping the forces of the Islamists on the defensive. Osama hasn’t barked in seven years on American soil. What will it take to extend that record?
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.