UBL and GWB: kissing in a tree

the other day, Miguel mentioned this article by Alan Bock at antiwar.com - and i've only just got around to reading it. it's mostly about the egadmin's power grab - specifically the Unitary nonsense and FISA and what have you - but Miguel wanted to focus on this section:

"...I'm not so paranoid as to think they have purposely avoided capturing Osama bin Laden so as to keep the potential threat always out there. But it was certainly convenient for the U.S. government that bin Laden showed up on audiotape last week making new threats, giving president Bush an opportunity to invoke him once again in his speech at the NSA.

I would argue, on the other hand, that almost everything the administration has done since 9/11 suggests a fundamentally unserious approach to bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Intelligence was poor, to be sure, but it was not nonexistent. After 9/11 the administration didn't use what was available about Afghanistan but went in cold and blundered about, failing to capture either Mullah Omar or bin Laden. Then it attacked Iraq, which had not been involved in the 9/11 attacks (and didn't have WMDs either), which stretched U.S. military forces to the breaking point and served as a recruiting ground for terrorists.

All these activities had the effect of building up the state without posing any more than trivial inconveniences – in some cases bolstering – the terrorists who pose the most concrete threat to the United States. Is it too fanciful to suggest that building the state rather than destroying or even seriously weakening al-Qaeda was the primary goal?"

I could quibble about some of the details but it's certainly possible to construct a narrative about the inherent symbiosis of the relationship between UBL and the Idiot Son - and there certainly is a large body of fiction where protagonist and antagonist are inextricably co-dependent.

It's kinda easy to imagine that GWB couldn't exist without osama, and (to a lesser extent) vice-versa. Perhaps life is just like that sometimes, or perhaps UBL is simply playing GWB like a fiddle... (and then there are those other possibilities).