Tony Snow, in a USA Today column, waxes philosophical:
Politics sometimes manages to muddle the obvious.Well, yes, Tony. That's your job.
Case in point:
We never argued that he played a role 9/11; political opponents manufactured the claim to question the president's integrity.Manufactured? Maybe not.
The al-Qaeda of 2001 no longer exists. We've killed or captured two-thirds of its senior leadership.Right.
Al-Qaeda doesn't have the strength it had six years ago, but it remains committed to killing Americans.And Tony has to go back 6 years to find a time when Bush could plausibly claim al-Qaeda was stronger than they are today. That's encouraging, isn't it?
More than anything, al-Qaeda wants the United States to leave Iraq and hand victory to the terrorists.Oh do they?
Recent military action has inflicted serious damage on al-Qaeda in Iraq and has inspired a growing number of Iraqis to fight al-Qaeda. That vindicates the president's faith in liberty as a common inheritance of mankind.The obvious point here is that al-Qaeda isn't the only (or even the primary) opponent in Iraq. The equally obvious point is that inflicting damage in Iraq on an enemy that wasn't present at all there before we invaded doesn't exactly vindicate the president's faith in anything.
Good thing we have politics to muddle the obvious.
|