The U.S. intelligence community is palsied by lawyers. When we were going to capture Osama bin Laden, for example, the lawyers were more concerned with bin Laden's safety and his comfort than they were with the officers charged with capturing him. We had to build an ergonomically designed chair to put him in, special comfort in terms of how he was shackled into the chair. They even worried about what kind of tape to gag him with so it wouldn't irritate his beard. The lawyers are the bane of the intelligence community.
I've said before: If Osama bin Laden was a Christian, Iraq was the Christmas present he always wanted but never expected his parents to give. It validated for the Muslim world virtually all of bin Laden's rhetoric. He had always said the Americans will destroy any strong Muslim regime, and we did.
I think one of the most destructive things in terms of American security has been for all of our leaders, without exception in both parties, to identify Osama bin Laden as a gangster or as a madman, as an apocalyptic character who's out to destroy our civilization.
He [Osama bin Laden] is clearly an odd combination of a 12th-century theologian and a 21st-century CEO. He runs an absolutely unique organization in the Islamic world. It's multiethnic, multilinguistic, multinational. He is a combat veteran, three times wounded. He has a huge reputation in the Islamic world for generosity and leadership. He's a man who speaks eloquent, almost poetic Arabic, according to Bernard Lewis.
No one should be surprised when Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda detonate a weapon of mass destruction in the United States. I don't believe in inevitability. But I think it's pretty close to being inevitable.
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