DEMOCRATS WRONG, AL QAEDA RIGHT ON IRAQ

Liberal pundit Michael Kinsley once defined a "gaffe" as a politician inadvertently blurting out the truth.  By that standard, Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Sen. John McCain, committed a gaffe in an interview June 23 with Fortune magazine.

Mr. Black was asked by Fortune editor David Whitford what the impact on the presidential election campaign would be if there were another terrorist attack on U.S. soil.
"Certainly it would be a big advantage to (McCain)," Mr. Black responded.

There followed a hypocritical minuet with which we've become too familiar.

First, the faux angry response from the Obama campaign: "The fact that John McCain's top adviser says that a terrorist attack on American soil would be a 'big advantage' for their political campaign is a complete disgrace, and is exactly the kind of politics that needs to change," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

Then, the distancing from Sen. McCain:  "I can't imagine why he would say it.  It's not true."

Finally, the groveling apology from Mr. Black:  "I deeply regret the comments — they were inappropriate."

Mr. Black had said nothing that wasn't true, or that Democrat political consultants don't say in private.  When voter attention is focused on national security, Sen. McCain benefits.  A terrorist attack would focus voter attention on national security.  

But the attention of voters is not focused on national security, chiefly because there hasn't been a terrorist attack on American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.  The number of experts who, on Sept. 12, 2001, would have predicted this happy state of affairs is precisely zero.

The absence of an attack suggests to some, among them Sen. Obama, that there wasn't much of a threat to start with.  They want to return to the law enforcement approach to fighting terrorism that prevailed before 9/11, and regard the Bush administration's efforts to surveil terrorists a greater threat to Americans than the terrorists themselves.

Since that approach contributed mightily to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers barracks, the 1998 bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the 2000 attack on the USS Cole, and, of course, 9/11, it's no wonder Americans prefer Sen. McCain on security issues.

"Before 9/11, America's counterterrorist capacities were, to put it politely, disorganized, unfocused, poorly staffed and poorly run," wrote former CIA officer Reuel Marc Gerecht.  

"To President Clinton's credit and great shame, he intellectually understood the nature and horrific potential of bin Ladenism and al Qaeda — as he understood, and regularly tasked his senior officials to explain nationally, the dangers of an increasingly restless Saddam Hussein.  Yet he could not summon the fortitude to strike devastatingly against al Qaeda and its Taliban protector or Iraq."

Doubtless much of our good fortune is due to increased vigilance by the FBI and other security agencies.  And some of it is due simply to good luck.  But the principal reason why we've been safe at home these last seven years has been the war in Iraq.

Sen. Obama describes the war in Iraq as a "distraction" from the war on terror.  But that's not how al Qaeda saw it.

In a 2005 letter to Abu Musab al Zarqawi, al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al Zawahiri, described Iraq as "the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era."

A few months earlier (December, 2004), Osama bin Laden himself said in an audiotape: "The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries; the Islamic nation on the one hand, and the United States and its allies on the other. It is either victory and glory or misery and humiliation."

For al Qaeda, Iraq has turned out to be misery and humiliation.  The best of its fighters have perished there, and so has its standing in the Arab world.  Support for the terror group has vanished within Iraq, and plummeted elsewhere in the Muslim world.  Other Islamic fundamentalists, among them Mr. Zawahiri's mentor, "Dr. Fadl," have criticized al Qaeda and called for nonviolence.

In 2003, Canadian columnist David Warren hypothesized Iraq would be the flypaper that would lure in al Qaeda, and where it would be destroyed.  While I doubt this was a deliberate Bush administration strategy, that's the way it's working out.

Al Qaeda was right that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror, but wrong about the outcome.  America's Democrats have been wrong about both.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.