Though it has been taken over by one zombie vice-president. But at least there aren’t multiple Dick Cheneys (as far as we know).
I realize you are joking, but just to make sure everyone’s clear: There have been relatively few terrorist attacks in the US during the Bush administration, but terrorist attacks worldwide have increased under his tenure.
You’re so naive.
Actually, that would mean there are an infinite number of worlds in which he comes out a winner. There are also an infinite number of worlds in which Bush is really a robot invented by a race of sentient bees out to destroy humanity.
Daniel
They increased big time during the Clinton presidency. Should we attribute that to the actions of our enemies, or call him a failure on that count?
We’re in one of those aren’t we? I just know it. Deep down I’ve always known it. 
No, because they didn’t increase because of the Clinton administration; they increased because the growing gap between haves and have-nots in the Arab world (and many other reasons the U.S. had little to do with) led to the emergence of people like bin Laden and al Qaeda and other terrorist groups which use the Western world as a scapegoat.
In contrast, much of the terrorist activity that’s happened over the past four years can be traced directly back to the actions of the Shrub in Iraq.
Doin’ the tu quoque kabuki, yeah, yeah…
Eh, I don’t know. Although I often disagree with Mr. Moto’s politics, I was struck by his statement. We (the short-attention-span American public) have indeed been hearing about wars and rumors of wars in Iraq since 1990…if it’s not the Highway of Death, it’s bombing Saddam’s provocations in the No-Fly Zone, or Shock and Awe. There was indeed occasional trading of potshots during the sanctions period. There may be something to the idea that the war seems very old because we’ve been getting that kind of news for 17 years.
Or perhaps my mind has been boggled?
Sailboat
So what’s the deal. Should we break out yardsticks to measure one president, and judge the measurements of another invalid along those same lines? Or, as seems more fair, does historic context matter?
ElvisL1ves compares above the containment policy pursued by Bush 1 and Clinton, and the yardstick chosen was the number of American deaths. This seems a poor one to me - there are plenty of policies we have pursued over the years that haven’t involved active use of our military, and these have been successes and failures alike. The same thing could be said about our interventions where soldiers did die.
While it may well be a fair point that Bush’s policies made terrorism worse, it also is a fair point that in the Clinton era terrorism also increased. At the minimum this would provide a baseline level of natural increase so that we can judge whether Bush is making the problem worse or better.
You think this is a fair point, regardless of the reasons why terrorism got worse under each president?
Your raison d’etre here is apparently to defend the Bush administration against anything and everything without hesitation. Your standard practice, failing anything else, is to shout “but Clinton” (or “but Truman”!!). Batting your eyes and pretending to have any interest in relevant history is simply nonsensical. You typically don’t care that any given historical context generally makes your comparision ludicrous.
Where does he do this? I cannot seem to find anything of the sort posted by ElvisL1ves here.
I’m loathe to even respond to this, because distraction is your primary intent. I don’t recall trends in terrorist activity during the 90’s off-hand, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they went down, simply because you’re saying that they increased dramatically. I also don’t recall them monkeying around with or failing to release their annual reports on the topic like the Bush administration has been doing. If nothing else, I would wager that the trends show a fairly flat slope during Clinton’s tenure and a dramatic spike under Bush.
I do think that worldwide terrorism is at least indirectly related to a president’s performance in office. Clinton’s involvement in Ireland, US involvement in the conflict between Israel and Palestine, policy towards the Middle East, the global economy… all of these things will have an impact on worldwide terrorism.
Nevertheless, I’m 99% sure that you don’t care one bit about a historical analysis of terrorist activity, except to the extent that you do your small part here to distract from any criticism of Bush.
Certainly. Especially if you are examining whether the response to such was adequate.
Nobody supposes presidents operate in a vacuum - they both influence events and are influenced by them. So I really object to simplistic assertions that various things were better or worse because of a particular number or metric.
“but Clinton…” 
A start would be some substantiation for your claim.
I agree. Let’s compare the 1,000 or so deaths per year in Iraq following containment against the current death toll in Iraq.
Or. we could compare the growth of the presence of al Qaida in Iraq–significant, today, compared to a single small training camp in the U.S. protected Kurdish North prior to the invasion.
As to any chances that we will not simply turn Iraq from a Sunni dominated hell hole into a Shi’a dominated hell hole, they (small as they were) are fading. Maliki has been very vocal, recently, that he opposes the U.S. cooperation with small groups of Sunnis to actually fight al Qaida, preferring that only Shi’a be armed when we leave. Last weekend, he even said that U.S. forces can leave, now (so that he can further arm his Shi’a buddies and go Sunni hunting). I see zero support among the Shi’a majority to resolve sectarian violence or build coalition governments. They seem to simply want us to go home so that they can play out Rwanda on a larger scale.
And this can be linked to Bush. We wandered in with our blatant support for a bank embezzler, failing to find out which Iraqis might actually be good leaders, and when we got blindsided as it turned out our hand-picked crook was a tool of Iran, we had no fallback people to support and had to let Maliki bribe his way into power. (Given the nascent state of democracy in the country, it was almost a given that whoever came to power would have bribed their way in, but we failed to make sure that there were any decent opponents to Maliki.)
A related issue:
The report just came out that al Qaeda is on the rise, and Bush astonishingly* spun it as a good thing, that they’d be even bigger if it weren’t for the war in Iraq, and that if we leave now, they’ll use Iraq as a safe staging ground for further growth.
Beyond the whitehot rage such a huge lie fills me with, I was wondering about the very last idea. Iraq, as I understand it, is majority Shi’ite. Al Qaeda is as Sunni as the Inquisition was Catholic. Is there any plausibility at all to the idea that a virulently Sunni terrorist group could thrive in a majority-Shi’ite country?
It seems to me that if the US leaves Iraq, it won’t free up Al Qaeda to attack the West: it’ll free up the Shi’ite insurgents and ex-Ba’athists to attack Al Qaeda, since they’ll no longer be venting their murderous rages on the US.
Daniel
- Or maybe not. I want a bumper sticker that says, “If you’re still outraged, you’ve not been paying attention very long.”
Or, better still, if General Jay Garner, who ran it at the beginning, had not been dismissed and replaced with Paul Bremer.
As for Bush, he has done everything Washington, Jefferson and Madison warned us against. That is how he will be remembered, no matter how things turn out in Iraq.
Well…you know, the insurgency thats been going on in Iraq for the last couple of years HAS been, by and large, a Sunni effort. Not that this means AQ, or that the efforts have been some monolithic movement…but I’d say that its at least plausible that a Sunni terrorist group could operate in a country where a Sunni insurgency has been going on for a while…even if the country has a Shi’a majority.
And each other of course. Afaik, it would be SUNNIC insurgent groups (plural) attacking Shi’a splinter groups AND the government…and all sides also attack AQ (when they weren’t working with them). I seriously doubt that the US leaving would have these factions put aside their hard feelings to go after AQ…
-XT
Really? Do you have any support for this assertion? What about al Sadr, the Mahdi army, all those folks the Iranians were accused of supplying weapons to?