Americans can prove Osama bin Laden wrong

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

In our Sunday newspaper, we suggested that the death of Osama bin Laden provides an opportunity to bring American troops home.
Today, let's look at how bin Laden hoped to bring about the downfall of the United States.
His own words tell us that bin Laden knew it would be impossible to defeat the United States militarily - just as, 20 years ago, it would have been impossible to defeat the Soviet Union militarily, not without ravishing the entire planet in the process.
Bin Laden hoped to use the same weapon against the United States that Ronald Reagan used against the Soviet Union.
Bankruptcy.
Though bin Laden's role is relatively small, the United States is terrifyingly close to bankruptcy, dissolution, possible civil disunion, decline and fall.
We owe $14 trillion.
A decade ago, we owed $6 trillion, less than half that amount.
The wars, plus the stupid enactment of a huge Medicaid prescription drug entitlement plan we can't afford, and continued refusal to enact more than cosmetic reductions in spending, could have already pushed us over that tipping point. We can't know. Tipping points become obvious only in hindsight.
Bin Laden is dead. Al Qaeda is dying.
Why don't we choose the path of life for our nation?
The precision special forces operation that assassinated bin Laden is infinitely less expensive than the rain of Tomahawk cruise missiles and plane-dropped bombs with which we struck Libya last month.
We should pull our troops back home.
We should cut federal spending, and increase some taxes, to balance the budget and start to chip away at the national debt.
We killed the man.
Let's repudiate the strategy as well.
Let's come together, not in attempts to preserve entitlements or privileges, but in a commitment to restore this nation to the principles that made us great, including fiscal responsibility, an end to deficit spending, and an end to military deployments abroad that come to be perceived as imperialist and/or never-ending.
Let's prove bin Laden's strategy wrong.