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The Bush administration, which baffled the world when it used an attack by Islamic fundamentalists to justify the overthrow of a brutal but secular regime, and which has been utterly ruthless in its political exploitation of the Sept. 11 attacks, must be very, very afraid.
Polls suggest that a reputation for being tough on terror is just about the only remaining political strength that President George W. Bush has. Yet this reputation is based on image, not reality. The truth is that Bush, while eager to invoke Sept. 11 on behalf of an unrelated war, has shown consistent reluctance to focus on the terrorists who actually attacked America, or their backers in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan.
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This reluctance dates back to Bush's first months in office. Why, after all, has his inner circle tried so hard to prevent a serious investigation of what happened on Sept. 11? There has been much speculation about whether officials ignored specific intelligence warnings, but what we know for sure is that the administration disregarded urgent pleas by departing Clinton officials to focus on the threat from Al Qaeda.
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After Sept. 11, terrorism could no longer be ignored, and the military conducted a successful campaign against Al Qaeda's Taliban hosts. But the failure to commit sufficient U.S. forces allowed Osama bin Laden to escape. After that, the administration appeared to lose interest in Al Qaeda; by the summer of 2002, bin Laden's name had disappeared from Bush's speeches. It was all Saddam Hussein, all the time.
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http://www.iht.com/articles/510524.html
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