I’m continually puzzled by the liberal allegation that 9-11 happened because the Bush administration distracted itself with missile defense–the latest version of this claim appears in today’s Washington Post, which runs a big story on how Condi Rice was going to give a pro-missile defense speech the day the terrorists struck. The logic here is sort of like saying if we’d only had better airline security on 9-11, regime change in Iraq would not have been necessary. Missile defense has little to do with terrorism; it responds to a completely different set of threats, which were compelling three years ago and remain so today. The topic of Rice’s undelivered speech is a piece of trivia, not a revelation.