Andrew Sullivan used the terrorist atrocity in Spain to try and score debating points on behalf of Bush. He either hasn't yet figured out the glaring flaw in his position or he's deliberately ignoring it.

Luckily, TAPPED's Matt Yglesias is around to help him out:

TAPPED: THE RAIN IS GONE. Andrew Sullivan speculates that al-Qaeda may have been behind yesterday's horrific bombings in Madrid:

If it is the beginning of an Islamist terror campaign throughout Europe, then we will witness a cultural and military war on that continent not seen since the last world war. We can only hope it won't transpire, that we have managed to keep al Qaeda at bay. But if it does, we can equally hope that the democratic nations of Europe will begin to realize what Tony Blair and George Bush have been warning about for so long. The enemy is clear. The question is not whether it will strike, but whether the West can strike back and decisively defang and defeat it. It's up to Europe now. Maybe now they'll get it.

Well, the enemy's clear to me but I'm pretty sure Tony Blair and George Bush decided a year ago that they should go attack Saddam Hussein. Indeed, when they had the closest thing to an al-Qaeda operative that could be found in Iraq -- but not in the part of Iraq under Saddam's control -- Bush decided to let him go in order to further his political agenda.

It looks like it might have been a bit of a mistake to let Osama bin Laden spend a couple of years cooling his heels in Pakistan while we conduct[ed] an unrelated war in Iraq. That, I think, would be seeing clearly.

Has Sullivan ever responded to that line of argument, or even acknowledged that it's been put forth? I haven't seen it, but then again I can only stand reading so much Sullivan-neocon lovey-dovey before I get nauseous, so I admit I'm not as informed as I could be on that score.

Sullivan, Instapundit and their friends talk a good muscular-foreign-policy game, but they clearly preferred Get Saddam Now/Let Osama Wait as their foreign policy for 2002-2003.

And they call their opponents pro-terrorist.