There was a recent article in the Washington Post suggesting that as President, Barack Obama may be inclined to resume efforts to locate and kill Osama Bin Laden. Well, it’s about freakin’ time. The fact that this effort needs to be RESUMED at all is a complete travesty all by itself. The annual Easter Egg hunt on the White House lawn has been better organized than the hunt for Bin Laden. What’s a hard working terrorist to do? If you don’t blow up something big every couple of years, you fall right off the radar screen.

I’m not sure exactly when Bush’s cojones shriveled up on his promise to “find Bin Laden and bring him to justice”. Or for that matter, on his commitment to bring peace and democracy to Afghanistan. Maybe he just lost interest because A) Afghanistan is really hard to pronounce, and he has a lot of trouble with stuff like that, B) there’s no oil there, only poppies, and the Heroin industry doesn’t contribute much to the Republican Party, and C) unlike Saddam, Bin Laden and the Taliban didn’t insult his family and try to kill his Daddy. Apparently Al-Qaeda’s insult to all of America on 9/11 wasn’t quite enough to keep the fire in Dubya’s belly lit.

Bringing out the tough talk early, Barack Obama is already starting to make noises about our relationship with Pakistan and their “commitment” to help root out Bin Laden. Of course, a different approach is required when dealing with an organized, Military-centric government with nuclear weapons (like Pakistan) than with an Islamic-centric government run by a bunch of ragtag fundamentalists (like Afghanistan). But I hope the message we send to Pakistan in 2009 matches the one we sent to the Afghans in 2001- if you harbor Bin Laden, even by just looking the other way, empty diplomatic promises of cooperation are not going to keep you safe forever.

I know, bringing Bin Laden’s head out on a White House chafing dish for the world to see won’t really solve much. He represents an ideology, and it does no good to drop bunker busters or cruise missiles on an ideology. Unfortunately, our Commander in Chief never seemed to understand that. Putting a weak puppet like Hamid Karzai in charge and then destroying pickup trucks full of radicals for seven years may only make the ideology stronger. Communism in the Soviet Union wasn’t defeated with bullets and bombs, but more with words and ideas. By talking to both friends AND enemies - which Bush has always refused to do.

So Bin Laden goes on leading Al-Qaeda remotely as he has for these past seven years, masterminding terrorist bombings in places like Bali and England and Spain, and releasing video and audio taped diatribes whenever the mood strikes him. Bush occasionally puffs up his chest and assures us that Osama’s “on the run”, cowering in some wretched hole in the ground somewhere along the Afghan-Pakistani border. But let’s shift our focus to another hole in the ground, the big one on the west side of Manhattan where the World Trade Center once stood. After seven years of chasing Bin Laden, our hole in the ground says more about his success than his hole in the ground says about ours.