Today marks a year since the death of Osama bin Laden, the patron and leader behind the attacks of Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001. At the risk of politi­ciz­ing those events, let’s look into how those events have been, well, politicized.

From the begin­ning, the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion in par­tic­u­lar, and the Repub­li­can Party in gen­eral, have used the al Qaeda attacks for polit­i­cal advan­tage. On May 1, 2003, Pres­i­dent Bush took a vic­tory lap, in an immense staged event on an air­craft car­rier, pro­claim­ing that “Major com­bat oper­a­tions in Iraq have ended.” Of course, they hadn’t ended, and things went so badly so quickly that in 2007 the Bush Admin­is­tra­tion had to engage in a mas­sive “surge” to make up for the dis­as­ter of the Iraq war. It was not until August 31, 2010, that a dif­fer­ent pres­i­dent, Barack Obama, could hon­estly declare an end to com­bat oper­a­tions in Iraq.

There is a pat­tern here, not only of Repub­li­cans politi­ciz­ing national secu­rity issues, but of Pres­i­dent Obama clean­ing up for­eign pol­icy messes left by Pres­i­dent Bush. The response of the Repub­li­can Party has been to fur­ther politi­cize these events, and attempt to min­i­mize the suc­cesses that Obama had but that Bush couldn’t achieve. (more…)