Bush's Glorification of Osama bin Laden and Obama's reversal

In Commonweal magazine's After the War on Terror, Jack Miles writes:

President George W. Bush first used the fateful phrase “war on terror” in an address to Congress on September 20, 2001, identifying what he later called “the defining struggle of our time.” And though initially the 9/11 attacks united the West while embarrassing and dividing the Muslim world, in time the rhetoric of a “war on terror” reversed those terms. With just three words, the president managed to transform Osama bin Laden from a criminal fugitive into a historic military commander, the head of a new, potentially world-changing army of fanatics. The subsequent invasion of Iraq, centerpiece of the Bush war on terror, only confirmed bin Laden in many Muslim eyes as a Saladin rather than a mass murderer.

Erasing that phrase from the U.S. diplomatic lexicon, the Obama administration has put Bin Laden back in his proper place and the administration "has replaced a grandiose, counterproductive fantasy with realistic attention to a set of grievous but real problems."

Read the entire piece here.