The History Hole, OBL and GWB

I just wanted to use this pic...

Ezra Klein is despairing because of this.  A bunch of teenagers, by the look of their Facebook icons, don't know who Osama Bin Laden is.

OK, I teach pretty good history students at a darn good school, so I'm not surprised that my kids know who he is.  Also, too, we are near NYC, so 9/11 probably has more resonance than it does in suburban Tucson.

But I also read AP US History exams every June, and I am exposed to the historical inadequacies of the American teen (and mind you, these are the teenagers deemed ready to take the AP exam).

Yes, Americans as a whole and teenagers specifically are woefully uninformed about our recent and distant past.  The fact that a bunch of knuckleheads don't know who Bin Laden is (UPDATE: Still dead!) does not shock me.

But we also have to consider that Bin Laden was shoved down the History Hole.  In March of 2002, George Bush got up and said, "I really just don't spend that much time" thinking about him.

Now, there's some logic to that.  Rather than spend a bunch of time and effort finding the guy - who could be anywhere - why not just minimize his importance?  Why not downplay his role as the fulcrum of global terrorism?

Of course, as we now know, Bush was spending a lot more time thinking about Iraq than Bin Laden, but that's a different thread.

On July 4th (really?!), 2006, the Bush Administration shut down the Bin Laden unit at the CIA.  I think part of that decision had to do with the mindset of Bush's national security team, made up of Cheney, Rice and Rumsfeld, who were more focused on state actors.  State on state violence was what they understood, that was the model they had inhabited their whole lives.  Renegade individuals and small groups were not central to their understanding of American security.  It's why - with Ground Zero still smoldering - they shifted their focus towards Iraq.  That was why - after the Taliban government fell - they mostly abandoned the nation building in Afghanistan.

But the cumulative effect was to make Bin Laden disappear for long periods of time.  The last significant act he made may have been the audio tape he released right before the 2004 election.

The point of this is not to criticize the Bush Administration's handling of Bin Laden, although the criticism is there plain to see.  But rather to explain why people who are 15 years old wouldn't know who Osama is anymore then they know who Hideki Tojo or Josef Stalin is.

He was buried as a real person long before they chucked his corpse over the side of a naval vessel.  He was only valuable when he could be used as a political tool, the way both Clinton and McCain tried to use Obama's statement that he would act unilaterally inside Pakistan if he knew where Bin Laden was.  If you blinked, you missed it.

Now, he's gone for good.  As Jon Stewart noted, now the face of the Arab world can be the young people of Egypt and Tunisia, and not this immoral mass murderer.

Now we can bury the man along with his deeds.