“Iraq was a hotbed of terrorism,” Matthew Dowd said on Hardball in 2004. Saddam Hussein “harbored terrorists. And in a post-9/11 environment, we can’t wait for the bad guys to show back up here in America and deal with it. … And the president said the fact of what we did in Iraq in bringing Iraq, a sovereign country, and removing a brutal dictator from power is a good thing for the world and a good thing for the country.”

Dowd was President George W. Bush’s chief adviser in his 2004 reelection. The central issue in Bush’s 2004 reelection was Bush’s response to the 9/11 attacks, which, most centrally, was the Iraq War.