Gigot's Iraq Fallacy

Just had Fox News on while I was washing dishes. Paul Gigot committed the following fallacy:

(Note: These are not his exact words, but this is the exact sense of what he said.)

Democrats argue that the war in Iraq was a distraction from the war on terrorism; but the recent arrests of al Qaeda operatives (in Pakistan and the UAE, presumably) show that they are wrong.

Whew, what a stinker. For quite awhile I've been meaning to run a series called something like "Fallacies For Our Time." Might as well make this the first one. Let's call it "Gigot's Iraq Fallacy."

Compare:

My folks thought that playing X-Box ten hours per day would be a distraction from my education. But I just passed two quizzes, so this shows that they were wrong.

But moderate (or even great) success in an endeavor in no way indicates that the endeavor would not have been more successful if it had not been hampered in some relevant way.

Do we really need to point out that some successes in our efforts against al Qaeda (or the "war" on "terror") do not show that Iraq was not a distraction? Need we really point out that $144 billion dollars, the full attention of our nation, and greater cooperation by the rest of the world might have allowed us to nab a more respectable number of aQ bad guys? And if we'd left our special forces teams in Afghanistan instead of sending them to Iraq? Or put a respectable number of boots on the ground at Tora Bora? Would OBL still be plotting his evil plots against us?

Jeez, reasoning this bad really ticks me off.