Did they protect bin Laden?

I keep hearing about the recent Congressional report detailing how exactly U.S. troops failed to nail down Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora in 2001, because everybody talking in the media about Obama’s new Afghanistan surge is asked about it and agrees with it, laying the blame for the entire subsequent eight years at the feat of Tommy Franks and Donald Rumsfeld. Let’s face it, if bin Laden had been arrested and jailed for life as other convicted terrorist subjects in this country have been, the ongoing and exhausting crisis of the wars might’ve been avoided, and Obama’s surge, wise and correct or foolish and wrong, wouldn’t have been necessary.

It’s easy to play what-if, but before my scariest speculation drops here with a gruesome splat like a pterodactyl’s egg, a speculation I haven’t yet heard elsewhere, let’s quote the report:

“[T]he Al Qaeda leader would live to fight another day. Fewer than 100 American commandos were on the scene with their Afghan allies and calls for reinforcements to launch an assault were rejected. Requests were also turned down for U.S. troops to block the mountain paths leading to sanctuary a few miles away in Pakistan. The vast array of American military power, from sniper teams to the most mobile divisions of the Marine Corps and the Army, was kept on the sidelines. Instead, the U.S. command chose to rely on airstrikes and untrained Afghan militias to attack bin Laden and on Pakistan’s loosely organized Frontier Corps to seal his escape routes. On or around December 16, two days after writing his will, bin Laden and an entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan’s unregulated tribal area. Most analysts say he is still there today.

“The decision not to deploy American forces to go after bin Laden or block his escape was made by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his top commander, Gen. Tommy Franks, the architects of the unconventional Afghan battle plan known as Operation Enduring Freedom. Rumsfeld said at the time that he was concerned that too many U.S. troops in Afghanistan would create an anti-American backlash and fuel a widespread insurgency. Reversing the recent American military orthodoxy known as the Powell doctrine, the Afghan model emphasized minimizing the U.S. presence by relying on small, highly mobile teams of special operations troops and CIA paramilitary operatives working with the Afghan opposition. Even when his own commanders and senior intelligence officials in Afghanistan and Washington argued for dispatching more U.S. troops, Franks refused to deviate from the plan.”

There’re reams of communication that even Congress didn’t get to peruse, of course, and plenty of gaps in the available record. So here’s my thought, my naturally low-boiling paranoia bubbling over thanks to the fuel provided by the Bush Administration’s countless duplicities, evil machinations and mercenary secrets: if the battle following 9/11 would have effectively ended with the capture of bin Laden and the collapse of a semi-organized Al Qaeda, then what reason would Bush & Co. have had to invade Iraq? They had no real, or sensible, reason, we know that for sure. Just a series of scaremongering flashcards. But they used the ongoing climate of dread and rage to put us there, erecting one temporary justification after another, at a cost of a still untold number of lives. We know the Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, etc. team were interested in an Iraq invasion before 9/11, and Richard Clarke has told us it was virtually the first thing out of their mouths that morning eight years ago when the towers fell. But they would have lost their opportunity if bin Laden were caught or killed.

What if they didn’t want that to happen? What if they wanted to keep bin Laden alive, to give them a working justification for their already detailed invasion plan?

What if they deliberately pulled back at Tora Bora, to allow the “endless war” to commence?

I’m speculating. We’ll probably never know. But would you put it past them?