Bush bytes - cooked intel preposterous

USA Today has some highlights of the Bush press conference. No surprises in what I missed. He said it was preposterous (pretty big word for him) to suggest the White House is cooking intel for an Iran strike. If memory serves he said that about Iraq too, but I've been thinking about this talking point that the White House has been pounding practically from day one of the invasion.

But, "to step back from the fight in Baghdad would have disastrous consequences for people in America," Bush said. If "we fail there, the enemy will follow us here."

I mean how dumb is this really? Are we supposed to believe that the only thing keeping "them" over there is they can't leave Baghdad as long as we're there fighting Iraq's civil war for them? Just this morning, my co-blogger in Detroit made the related claim, that the absence of an attack since 9/11 somehow proves the terrorists are too preoccupied with Iraq to attack us at home.

Call me crazy, but if you were a terrorist who wanted to harm the US, and you had a choice, would you be wasting your time standing in the line of fire in a place where there are already thousands of local insurgents keeping our troops busy in a place so far away and so out of the mainstream news for the most part that your attacks will barely make a ripple in the news cycle or would you rather sneak into the US and blow something big up to get attention?

Putting aside the popular conspiracy theory that it was the Bush administration that engineered the 9/11 attack themselves and assuming it was solely the work of terrorists, isn't it just possible that 9/11 was a flash in the pan -- an unexpectedly successful strike -- and they really don't have the ability to carry out another spectacular event like that again? Isn't it possible that just maybe, the terrorists aren't the huge omnipotent threat the adminstration would like you to believe they are? Just asking....