From where I sit, former vice president Dick Cheney had the easier case to make today.

His speech had a lot of phrases I loved; when Cheney said that the New York Times was "publishing secrets in a way that could only help al-Qaeda. It impressed the Pulitzer committee, but it damn sure didn’t serve the interests of our country, or the safety of our people," the audience emited a few "oohs" like they had just watched a blindside blitz level a quarterback.

But in a nutshell, the Cheney argument is, "it worked." And when he notes that after 9/11, the administration and all of the various government agencies managed to prevent another attack on American soil for 2,689 days, it's a rather illuminating figure. Early on, Cheney also quickly repeated the list of al-Qaeda's hits from the 1990s both on U.S. soil and abroad: "In 1993, they bombed the World Trade Center, hoping to bring down the towers with a blast from below. The attacks continued in 1995, with the bombing of U.S. facilities in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; the killing of servicemen at Khobar Towers in 1996; the attack on our embassies in East Africa in 1998; the murder of American sailors on the USS Cole in 2000." That's six major bombings, with many casualties, in six years.

But the unspoken contrast goes beyond U.S. soil . . . In fact, since 9/11, have we seen any indisputably successful al-Qaeda attacks on American targets outside of our borders, besides Iraq and Afghanistan? I recall a grenade being sent through an embassy window in Athens. I know they attacked the British consulate in Istanbul, and a not-terribly-successful attack on our consulate there, as well as an attempted attack on our consulate in Jiddah. Gunmen tried to attack the U.S. Embassy in Syria. I suppose you could consider the attacks on the hotels in Amman stand-ins for American targets. Looking back, we see fatal attacks outside the consulate in Karachi and at a housing compound for westerners in Riyadh.

But nothing on par with what al-Qaeda did in the 1990s.

The standard has been set; Obama is now tinkering with the methods. They're betting a lot — not just their chance at a second term, but the lives of you and me — that they can get the same results with different methods. We will see.

NRO