I had originally read this piece by Ed Gillespie with a mix of amazement and disgust.
Most of my disgust was directed toward his rebuttal of the commonly known fact that “the war in Iraq caused us to take our eye off the ball in Afghanistan and al Qaeda.” In his attempt to undermine the truth for political purposes, he tries to conflate Iraq with Afghanistan, by saying that they are “two fronts in the same war.” He fails to mention that there was no al Qaeda in Iraq before we invaded. How can one be so blind to this reality? Many apologists for the war continue to say that we’ve done good work in rooting out al Qaeda from their outposts in the Sunni Triangle. How is it good work if we haven’t even yet completely destroyed the monster which didn’t exist before we created it? Once al Qaeda is gone from Iraq, we will be back to square one, but that won’t amount to “good work.”
Matt Yglesias points out an even worse talking point of Gillespie’s, though—one that I’ve seen far too many times:
“And one last fact: Our homeland has not suffered another terrorist attack since September 11, 2001. That, too, is part of the real Bush record.”
I can’t respond to this any better than Yglesias, so I’ll just post his riposte here:
“This is like saying that except for the Great Depression, Herbert Hoover had a good economic record. The vast majority of Americans to have ever been killed by foreign terrorists were killed under George W. Bush’s watch. As Gillespie says, whether or not a president succeeds in preventing foreign terrorists from murdering thousands of American citizens is an important part of that president’s record. And Bush took office on January 20, 2001. Nine or so months later by far the largest terrorist attack on American soil was perpetrated. That’s a fantastically enormous failing. If you only look at Bush’s final seven years, you’ll see that he was as good as every other president at preventing terrorist attacks. And if you include his entire presidency, you’ll see that he was by far the worst.”
