Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New America Foundation and author of The Osama bin Laden I Know, wrote a New Republic cover story on October 22, 2007 titled, “War of Error: How Osama bin Laden Beat George W. Bush.” In it Bergen concluded this:

America’s most formidable foe – once practically dead – is back. This is one of the most historically significant legacies of President Bush. At nearly every turn, he has made the wrong strategic choices in battling Al Qaeda. To understand the terror network’s resurgence – and its continued ability to harm us – we need to reexamine all the ways in which the administration has failed to crush it. . . . If, as the president explained in a speech [in 2006], the United States is today engaged “in the decisive ideological struggle of the twenty-first century,” right now we are on the losing side of the battle of ideas.

Yesterday, Bergen published a piece in the Washington Post’s Outlook Section which, while pointing out that al Qaeda is gaining strength on the Afghan-Pakistani border, says this:

But [al Qaeda’s] grand project — to transform the Muslim world into a militant Islamist caliphate — has been, by any measure, a resounding failure. In large part, that’s because Osama bin Laden‘s strategy for arriving at this Promised Land is a fantasy. Al-Qaeda‘s leader prides himself on being a big-think strategist, but for all his brains, leadership skills and charisma, he has fastened on an overall strategy that is self-defeating.

Bin Laden’s main goal is to bring about regime change in the Middle East and to replace the governments in Cairo and Riyadh with Taliban-style theocracies. He believes that the way to accomplish this is to attack the “far enemy” (the United States), then watch as the supposedly impious, U.S.-backed Muslim regimes he calls the “near enemy” crumble.

This might have worked if the United States had turned out to be a paper tiger that could sustain only a few blows from al-Qaeda. But it didn’t. Bin Laden’s analysis showed no understanding of the vital interests — oil, Israel and regional stability — that undergird U.S. engagement in the Middle East, let alone the intensity of American outrage that would follow the first direct attack on the continental United States since the British burned the White House in 1814.

In fact, bin Laden’s plan resulted in the direct opposite of a U.S. withdrawal from the Middle East. The United States now occupies Iraq, and NATO soldiers patrol the streets of Kandahar, the old de facto capital of bin Laden’s Taliban allies. Relations between the United States and most authoritarian Arab regimes, meanwhile, are stronger than ever, based on their shared goal of defeating violent Islamists out for American blood and the regimes’ power.

For most leaders, such a complete strategic failure would require a rethinking. Not for bin Laden.

… No matter what bin Laden’s fate, Muslims around the world are increasingly taking a dim view of his group and its suicide operations. In the late 1990s, bin Laden was a folk hero to many Muslims. But since 2003, as al-Qaeda and its affiliates have killed Muslim civilians by the thousands from Casablanca to Kabul, support for bin Laden has nose-dived, according to Pew polls taken in key Muslim countries such as Indonesia and Pakistan.

So back in October, according to Bergen, Osama bin Laden wasn’t simply in the process of defeating George W. Bush; bin Laden had already beaten Bush, and bin Laden’s victory was due to Bush’s failure. But today, with al Qaeda’s “grand project” being judged “a resounding failure,” with its popularity plummeting, with bin Laden having overseen “a complete strategic failure,” and with America having shown itself not to be a paper tiger (which was the case, according to bin Laden, in Vietnam, Beirut, and Somalia), the one name that does not appear in Bergen’s piece is . . . George W. Bush. Having laid the blame at Bush’s feet earlier, Bergen is unwilling to credit Bush for a single good development.

To see just how tendentious Bergen’s analysis can be, consider these two paragraphs:

Until 2006, hardcore European jihadists would have traveled to Iraq. But the numbers doing so now have dwindled to almost zero, according to several European counterterrorism officials. That’s because al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Iraq has committed something tantamount to suicide.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq once held vast swaths of Sunni-dominated turf and helped spark a civil war by targeting Iraqi Shiites. But when the group imposed Taliban-style measures, such as banning smoking and shaving, on Iraq’s Sunni population and started killing other insurgents who didn’t share its ultra-fundamentalist views, other Sunnis turned against it. Today al-Qaeda in Iraq is dead, at least as an insurgent organization capable of imposing its will on the wider population. It can still perpetrate large-scale atrocities, of course, and could yet spoil Iraq’s fragile truce by again attacking Iraqi Shiites. But for the moment, al-Qaeda in Iraq is on the run, demoralized and surrounded by enemies.

Can you guess what’s missing from this analysis? How about the word “surge”? Nowhere does Bergen credit the decision by President Bush, announced in January 2007, to change strategy in Iraq. Nor does Bergen mention the name “Petraeus” or credit the United States military for the devastating route al Qaeda has experienced. This is not to say that the surge is wholly responsible for the progress we’ve made against AQI; the “Anbar Awakening” predated it. But even those with minimal understanding about events on the ground know that the surge provided a huge assist to the Sunni population which turned on AQI. And to ignore this reality is an example of thinking that is at best sloppy and at worst intellectually dishonest.

Mr. Bergen is living proof that anti-Bush sentiments can cloud the thinking of even intelligent individuals. It’s fine that Peter Bergen has finally caught up with what many others have seen and commented on for some time now. But even in (finally) recognizing the obvious, Bergen’s analysis is simplistic and flawed. He cannot escape his own political prejudices.

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