Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot of Electoral Math
I'm not exactly sure what could have been done differently, but like Neil, it seems to me that if an unstable anti-American regime in the Middle East develops nuclear weapons on your watch, perhaps because you were too busy trying to gin up an excuse to invade Iraq, you ought to shoulder some of the blame. How to make that happen from a PR standpoint isn't exactly clear to me.
Presumably, the proper response would have been to focus on Iran in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, and to offer a reasonable set of sticks (sanctions, air strikes) and carrots (oil & gas pipelines, trade) to Iran in exchange for open inspections at nuclear facilities, some type of political reform, and a crackdown on its funding of terrorism. Hopefully, stopping Iran from developing The Bomb would be enough to get Saudi Arabia to go along with it.
