At TNR, Lawrence Kaplan argues that the Bush Doctrine of preemption, democracy promotion and unilateral action should survive beyond Iraq, prompting Tapped's Spencer Ackerman to criticize the "misdguided but deep belief, as Doug Feith later put it, that 'Terrorist organizations cannot be effective in sustaining themselves over long periods of time to do large-scale operations if they don't have support from states.'" As evidence that this belief is misguided, Ackerman writes: "al-Qaeda doesn't have Afghanistan, or even Iraq, and it's plenty dangerous."

However, the question is not whether Al Qaeda is still dangerous – of course it is – but whether President Bush's policies have made it less dangerous. Clearly, Al Qaeda's ability to carry out large scale attacks against Americans has been severely compromised as a result of losing Afghanistan as a base: they haven't carried out an attack against Americans on the scale of the U.S. Embassy bombings or the U.S.S. Cole bombings, let alone 9/11.