Flip-Flopper in Chief

Josh Marshall on GWB's latest flip-flop:

It's hard to know where to begin in trying to disentangle the knot of jingoism, recklessness, bad faith and bamboozlement that is President Bush's latest boast that if he had good intelligence on bin Laden's whereabouts he would send US troops into Pakistan to catch him whether the Pakistanis agreed or not.

On Friday he suggested that he wouldn't because "Pakistan is a sovereign nation." And, yes, not invading other countries is a good rule of thumb in most cases, if one this president has tended to honor in the breach. But I think that given the unique history, most presidents and most Americans would be willing to violate another country's sovereignty if they had actionable intelligence that gave a good chance of a successfully capturing OBL.

So on nabbing bin Laden in Pakistan it sounds like the president was against it before he was for it. And as Peter Bergen notes, one of the reasons we don't have good actionable intelligence on where bin Laden is is that US troops aren't allowed to operate in Pakistan.

But why debate hypotheticals?

Why do we think President Bush would send troops into Pakistan to get bin Laden without permission when he wouldn't keep troops in Afghanistan (a country then wholly under American occupation) when we had bin Laden cornered at Tora Bora? The Bush-Cheney campaign was able to bamboozle its way through that net in 2004. But all the information that's come up over the last two years has confirmed as tightly as it ever can be confirmed that US intelligence knew bin Laden was at Tora Bora trying to make his escape into Pakistan but that President Bush didn't commit the necessary US manpower to the search because he was shifting priorities and resources to Iraq.

Then, now, before 9/11, it's always been about Iraq. bin Laden was just a way to get in.