>Tamar, after reading this, and reading Tracy's reply....I'm going to revisit my bashing of Bush for the last 7 years. Maybe I need to give him a little more credit.
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>He managed to achieve one thing that I highly doubt would have occured, had we followed either of your reasoning - after 9/11, he (Bush) managed to avoid any attacks on U.S. soil for the next 7 years.

As Tracy said, maybe there was attacks avoided. We'll never know (though our great-grandchildren might).

But what he especially accomplished was making far more people in other parts of world accepting of terrorism and of the radical strains of Islam. (Not all Muslims are radical. Not all branches of Islam are radical.) By failing to follow American principles after 9/11, he showed the world that those principles were only skin deep*, that we didn't really mean that we were a nation of laws, and that we didn't really believe that a person is innocent until proven guilty. The harm done will likely last for generations.

* I'm reminded of the thread Mike Cole started yesterday about integrity.

Tamar