"HeyBub" wrote in message
m...

Whether the business was a "bad thing" can be measured.

As the computer people say--garbage in, garbage out. More on that later.

It was never a goal of the Bush administration to kill or capture OBL
(after about 9/18).

We've discussed this before, and of course getting OBL was repeatedly voiced
as the policy of the Bush administration. That Bush later said he no longer
worried about that doesn't alter the fact that at one time he'd talked very
tough on the subject.

If our people ran across him in the course of other endeavors, that would,
of course, be a plus. But the single goal of the Bush folks was to to
prevent another attack on the US or US interests abroad. To do this, they
endeavored to devise strategies and tactics to disrupt terrorist
recruitment, training, financing, communication, movement, and
sanctuaries.

Those are worthy goals, but you've left out some important factors, like the
Bush administration *creating* opportunities for terrorists to attack U.S.
interests in the form of American soldiers stuck in a shooting gallery in
Iraq. You're also overlooking that the Bush administration had other goals,
regime change in the middle east being high on the list--that's why they
were determined to go into Iraq regardless of whether there was a real
threat of Saddam acquiring WMDs.

In this goal, the Bush administration was successful.

I agree; sadly they balanced that success with a bloody and hugely expensive
war in Iraq. It's like painting the front of your house but leaving the
back exposed to the elements....

Since Obama came to office, there have been three terrorist attacks on US
soil: The shootings at Ft Hood, the Christmas-day bomber, and the Times
Square bomber. Whether through "bad luck" or "taking one's eye off the
ball" may never be known.

And here is where GIGO comes in. Comparing 9/11 (where it does seem the
administration of the day didn't have its eye on the ball in that it
apparently ignored warnings from the previous administration that OBL was
determined to attack inside the U.S.) where thousands of Americans died, to
the pinprick attacks of lone nutcases that have occurred in the past couple
of years is to enter corrupt data into the system. Two of the three attacks
you named were unsuccessful, and the one that did result in fatalities
wasn't the kind of attack that any administration would have been likely to
have prevented as it came from someone inside the America military.

You're also overlooking that terror attacks didn't stop during the Bush
administration, they merely moved, both to where American soldiers were
conveniently acting as targets, and to places like Spain where the
terrorists were successful in using violence to split away a partner from
the "Coalition of the Willing". That's something OBL said he was going to
do, peel away America's allies which one by one left Iraq and are unlikely
to be interested in future adventures of that sort. He also said years ago
that his plan was to get America into a war in the middle or far east which
it would be unable to leave, where America would bleed for years to
come--sadly the Bush administration chose to play along.

So your comparison between the success of the Bush administration and the
supposed failure of the Obama administration relies on faulty data from the
beginning in that you downplay some factors and magnify others to get the
results you desire--GIGO. It doesn't matter how many times you measure if
you wrote down the wrong number in the first place as I recently confirmed
making a trellis for a climbing plant my wife thought would look nice beside
the front door. Unlike the mistakes of the Bush administration, the problem
with the trellis was easy to fix.