Daily Kos displays this chart of terror incidents by year …

… and concludes “Notice when attacks where going down, and when they started going up. Since it’s hard to read, the black bar, at the low point of international terrorist attacks, is the year 2000. Bush took power in 2001, and the rest is history.”

Outside the Beltway tears into this faulty correlation-is-causation argument (although he uses Latin!), and shows that if you remove the Middle East from the data,

If we go even further back and look at the data from 1975 on (the last 30 years) we’d see that the last several years of terrorism incidents on average are about average. Given that we are fighting a war on terrorism that is not all that bad (and it isn’t all that great either). If we go back even further, we can see that terrorism ramped up, then down and is now ramping back up. Are we to believe that this is all due which Presidents are elected…if so, then we need to go take back the Nobel Peace Prize from Jimmy Carter.

… If we define things even more selfishly and restrict things to Europe and North America the results are even more stark with the high point being 1995.

We used the same online graphing tool (here) to look at what we think is the most relevant data — deaths, not incidents, excluding the Middle East (so no Israeli - Palestinian conflict or Iraq). Since 1980 that looks like this:

Let’s look at just 2004, where Kos would have us believe the Bush Administration is responsible for 2,386 deaths outside the Middle East. Looking at the largest death tolls by country:

• 229 of the fatalities were in Afghanistan, principally Taliban attacks against the government (would Kos have us go back to the good ol’ days of Mullah Omar?)
• 233 in Pakistan (would he prefer an Islamo-fascist regime?)
• 459 in Russia, virtually all Chechnya, a conflict which dates to 1994;
• 316 in Uganda, perpetrated by the Lord’s Resistance Army (which is George Bush’s fault … how?)
• 216 in India and Kashmir … long-running border / separatist problems that are not exactly in the U.S. sphere of influence

Kos’ “logic” falls apart. Most of what he calls “international terrorism” is murderously local and has nothing to do with the U.S.

And just to help out the Clinton administration, the spike that began on their watch was similarly random. In 1998 there were nearly 700 deaths in Algeria caused by Islamic fundamentalists and almost 300 in Kenya from the bombing of the U.S. embassy. In 1999, 333 of the deaths were in Russia, mostly from a series of bomb attacks blamed on Chechens; in 2000, 150 were in Sri Lanka, 50 in India, and 184 in Colombia. With the exception of Kenya, which we now know was a precursor of things to come, these were primarily local conflicts.

Kos reveals the depth of his obsession with that statement “Bush took power in 2001, and the rest is history.” Kos apparently believes that if Al Gore were in the White House on September 11, 2001, Al-Queda would have called off its long-planned operation. I’m pretty sure even Al Gore doesn’t believe that.

What he should have written, but won’t, is “Bush became president in 2001. Terror attacks, both by Islamic fundamentalists and others, continued around the world.”

For a primer on logical fallacies, we send Kos here.

(hat tip: Neolibertarian Network)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, July 9th, 2005 at 1:00 am by A Senior Administration Official and is filed under War, Big Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.