All over the map

A good interview with Peter Bergen - CNN's Al-Qaeda expert. A bit depressing in that he finds:

I'm not convinced that they have the capacity to do anything inside the United States. But, I would have given you the same answer on September 10, 2001. What's much more likely than an attack timed for the U.S. election, is a bomb going off in London, or Heathrow airport or something like that.

Yet he places a lot of blame on the Iraq war for energizing Al-Qaeda:

I would say that al-Qaeda was tremendously energized by the war in Iraq. ... Al-Qaeda was on the ropes, and it has given them another reason for existence.

But given a lot of the evidence he cites related to the capture the Al-Qaeda management structure, and the decreasing frequency of Al-Qaeda's direct involvement in attacks he mentions, I wonder how to judge this belief. There's simply no tote board or database which makes it easy to discern.

Update: Bergen wrote a rather positive piece in the NY Times on Afghanistan. Dan Drezner has point/counterpoint.