The Will to Fight

From Frank Rich, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, page 223:

The price has been enormous, and not just in American and Iraqi lives. One hideous consequence of the White House's biggest lie - conflating Saddam's regime with the international threat of radical Islam, fusing the war of choice in Iraq with the war of necessity that began on 9/11 - is that the public, having turned against one war, automatically rejects the other. When Americans gave up on Iraq in 2005, the percentage who regarded fighting terrorism as a top national priority fell in sync. That's the bottom line of the Bush catastrophe: the administration at once increased the ranks of jihadists by turning Iraq into a new training ground and recruitment magnet while at the same time exhausting America's will and resources to confront that expanded threat.