Report Card on the War on Terror...the Bush administration’s strategy has failed.

Wednesday, November 21, 2007

A Report Card on the War on Terror

Guest Blogger

David Cole

Sometimes a statistic is worth a thousand words. In an effort to demonstrate as simply as possibly how ineffectual and costly the war on terror has been, Jules Lobel and I created a Report Card on the War on Terror, which was published in the LA Times on November 18. It reveals, in a single, digestible page – the print equivalent of a “soundbite” -- that the Bush administration’s strategy has failed. We think this is an especially important message in this election season, where too many Democrats seem to be running scared on the issue of national security. Among other things, the report card shows that since the administration declared its war on terror, the number of terrorist attacks worldwide has increased exponentially; we have discovered not a single Al Qaeda cell in the United States; we have obtained only two convictions for an attempted terrorist act (and only one of those was an Islamic terrorist); none of the more than 5,000 foreign nationals we preventively detained as “suspected terrorists” in the first two years after 9/11 turned out to be a terrorist; and we have spent about twice as much on the war in Iraq (where nearly 4,000 Americans and approximately 80,000 Iraqi civilians have died already) than we have on homeland security.