The Pew Research Center released a poll showing support for Osama bin Laden had waned considerably among Muslims around the world. That’s not terribly surprising a year after his death. But what is worth calling attention to is that bin Laden’s popularity decreased substantially during the Bush years and the “war on terrorism.”
Why point this out at all? Because there was a popular theory advanced by foreign policy analysts like Peter Bergen, which (in 2007) sounded like this:
America’s most formidable foe once practically dead is back. This is one of the most historically significant legacies of President Bush. At nearly every turn, he has made the wrong strategic choices in battling al-Qaeda. To understand the terror networks’ resurgence and its continued ability to harm us we need to reexamine all the ways in which the administration has failed to crush it.
Bergen also believed the war in Iraq gave new life to al-Qaeda; in fact, the war ended up dealing a devastating blow to al-Qaeda.
Bergen’s premise, as well as his analysis, were deeply flawed. The Bush years were very bad ones for bin Laden and for what Bergen called “America’s most formidable foe.” It’s worth adding, I suppose, that they weren’t good years for Bergen’s credibility as a commentator on world events.
Bergen has a new book out and I thought you were going to show him to be lacking in credibility. You do nothing of the sort with your cite to the Pew data, which simply shows a decline in OBL's popularity over time and says nothing about the cause(s) of that decline. (Pew attributes a precipitious fall from a 61% to 24% approval rating in Jordan between '05 and '06 to the reaction there to suicide bombing attacks in Amman, but you would credit the Bush administration with this?!) n nBergen maintains that OBL might have been killed a decade ago, that is on the Bush administration's watch if a properly coordinated military effort had been directed by General Tommy Frank, and he maintains that the effort to get OBL after that time was subsequently hindered by a huge diversion of intelligence resources to the Iraq theater. He argues, very plausibly I think, that "indirect" effects in Iraq were most damaging to Iraq, those an abreaction by Muslims to the killing of Muslims directed by al-Qaeda, rather than efforts we directed at al-Qaeda in Iraq (where there had not been an al-Qaeda presence before the war).
(continued): If you want to rebut the claim that Bergen made in 2007, namely that al-Qaeda was at some point after 9/11 "practically dead" and then resurged because the Bush administration went about finishing the job in the wrong way, then you have to engage with that claim and adduce on point evidence to contradict his contention(s). You haven't done that, and if anything, your failure to do so does more to support him as a terror analyst than to impeach him as such. If you have a stronger case to make, please make it.