Just a reminder of why this mass-murdering fundamentalist psychopath is still on the loose :

Bush’s original comment came while U.S. forces in Afghanistan were searching for the Al Qaeda leader, who had eluded joint American-Afghan military operations designed to find him.

“We haven’t heard much from him. And I wouldn’t necessarily say he’s at the center of any command structure. And, again, I don’t know where he is,” Bush said during the 2002 news conference. “I’ll repeat what I said. I truly am not that concerned about him. I know he is on the run.

“I was concerned about him when he had taken over a country,” Bush continued. “I was concerned about the fact that he was basically running Afghanistan and calling the shots for the Taliban. But once we set out the policy and started executing the plan, he became ? we shoved him out more and more on the margins. He has no place to train his Al Qaeda killers anymore.”

Pay special attention to that last part. It explains everything we need to know about how Bush judges success in the wars on terror and in Iraq.

He was concerned about bin Laden because “he had taken over a country”. Once the Taliban was overthrown, Bush was satisfied that bin Laden was declawed and no longer a threat. The same held true with Saddam. Once he had been driven from his Baghdad palaces into a spider-hole, Bush felt that the mission had been accomplished. In Bush’s view, this new threat isn’t about the man or those who support his ideals, it’s about the governmental structure from which he gains support. Once the bureacracy has been defeated, the threat isn’t there.

This all goes back to the argument Kevin Drum has been making a lot lately :

There’s all sorts of interesting stuff in Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer’s Washington Post article about the Bush record in the war on terror today, but running through it all is a thread that I’ve mentioned before: George Bush’s outmoded focus on state sponsors of terror (the “axis of evil”) vs. John Kerry’s focus on al-Qaeda and other non-state terrorist groups as the real problem of the 21st century.

Again: it’s not that they aren’t both important. But we’re not fighting World War II and we’re not fighting the Cold War. Radical Islamic terrorism is a fundamentally different problem than either of these previous enemies, and it’s not, at its core, state-centric. This is the key blind spot that prevents Bush from effectively prosecuting the war, and it’s the key piece of understanding that suggests Kerry could do better.

Damn right.