Replies

Conventional wisdom is that UBL is in the mountains in the NorthWest provinces of Pakistan, protected by a ring of villages that would fight to the death to protect him (I suppose you could call that "Vietnam"). I don't think that's what Lehman was trying to say, however. We could lean very hard on Musharraf for permission to go after him if we knew where he was in Pakistan. Rather, I believe Lehman meant that UBL is in Iran. We would obviously have to go to war with the Iranians to get him out, and that could involve a Vietnam level commitment, Vietnam casualties, and (as opposed to Al Qaeda) the Iranians know how to do terrorism.