‘Six years ago, the White House had the opportunity to pursue a relatively small group of jihadists across the Earth. With the support of every country that mattered, we went into Afghanistan to oust the Taliban, who had given sanctuary to bin Laden and his mad dream of global jihad.

Then, the campaign against al-Qaida took a strange turn. For reasons that remain elusive, the Bush White House allowed bin Laden to slip away — figuratively commuting his sentence — and pointed the finger at Saddam Hussein, who had nothing to do with Sept. 11, who distrusted bin Laden, who threatened his neighbors but not the United States. Just as reliable intelligence reported that bin Laden had escaped to the caves of Tora Bora, on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the Pentagon began dispatching Special Forces operatives to Iraq.

It was a strategy that bin Laden himself might have mapped out. Not only did we bog down in Iraq, provoking a multifaceted insurgency that we have been unable to contain, but we also gave bin Laden just the recruiting tool he needed. Lawrence Wright, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning account, "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaida and the Road to 9/11," writes: "Al-Qaida's duty was to awaken the Islamic nation to the threat posed by the secular, modernizing West. To do that, bin Laden told his men, al-Qaida would drag the United States into a war with Islam — 'a large-scale front which it cannot control.' " The invasion of Iraq did just that.’

President's Hype Plays Right Into al-Qaida's Hands