Tom Friedman makes two remarkable admissions in his column today. Yes, he starts down the rhetorical  road trod by many of his fellow pundits,  conflating unauthorized and abusive treatment with highly controlled interrogation, and he throws in all the right jabs at the brutal Bushies. (Otherwise his Upper West Side readers might be scared off.) But then he veers back to reality and ticks off the reasons why Al Qaeda was and is an enemy like no other, concluding:

One more 9/11 would close our open society another notch. One more 9/11 and you’ll be taking off more than your shoes at the airport. We have the luxury of having this torture debate now because there was no second 9/11, and it was not for want of trying. Had there been, a vast majority of Americans would have told the government (and still will): “Do whatever it takes.”

So President Obama’s compromise [release memos but not prosecute] is the best we can forge right now: We have to enjoin those who confront Al Qaeda types every day on the frontlines to act in ways that respect who we are, but also to never forget who they are. They are not white-collar criminals. They do not care whether we torture or not — bin Laden declared war on us when Bill Clinton was president.

So I guess the Bush administration was pretty much in the mainstream of public opinion. And those like the Obama press secretary who claim the tactics made our own forces less safe are spouting nonsense. Good to know.

But then we have a real doozy. It seems Bush kept us safe by taking the fight to the terrorists in Iraq, where it is still essential we complete the victory:

I believe that the most important reason there has not been another 9/11, besides the improved security and intelligence, is that Al Qaeda is primarily focused on defeating America in the heart of the Arab-Muslim world — particularly in Iraq. Al Qaeda knows that if it can destroy the U.S. effort (still a long shot) to build a decent, modernizing society in Iraq, it will undermine every U.S. ally in the region.

Conversely, if we, with Iraqis, defeat them by building any kind of decent, pluralistic society in the heart of their world, it will be a devastating blow.

So to recap: the Bush team kept us safe from an implacable foe by using interrogation methods which the American public approved of and by fighting (often against the admonitions of Friedman and his colleagues) and largely prevailing in Iraq. The latter effort may deal a death blow to Al Qaeda which one supposes made it a very worthwhile endeavor. Well, yes, Friedman awards Obama the prize for “doing [his] best” in a war largely waged by his reviled predecessor — who is rarely praised for doing his best, but we get the point.

It must be some other George W. Bush who was the worst foreign policy president in history — because the 43rd president, by Friedman’s accounting, got some very big things right, despite ferocious odds. (One of President Bush’s librarians might want to clip this one out for the “Bush Legacy Inadvertently Revived By Obama” file.)