19 years after 9/11, America is finally in a better place in the Middle East... here's why

September 11th, 2001, and to a lesser extent, September 11th, 2012, stand out as two dates that brutally showed the depths to which America has suffered at the hands of radical Islam.

But as we pause today to remember the victims and heroes of those two attacks, there is no denying that the prospects for peace and prosperity for most of the Middle East and America's standing in that region have never been better.

You might have missed this encouraging truth in the midst of the news media's continuing policy of only focusing on its efforts to attack President Trump. But peace is breaking out in the Middle East these days; most recently between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and now Bahrain.

Both deals could not have been achieved without Saudi Arabia's approval, and the kingdom and Israel have been operating with a de facto peace agreement since 2014. Yes, that's the same Saudi Arabia where almost all of the 9/11 hijackers came from. But so much has changed in 19 years.

The biggest change of all being the fact that Israeli-Saudi cooperation began with and is still mostly focused on keeping their mutual enemy Iran in check. But it's also since branched out into more economic and cultural normalization thanks to the efforts of Saudi Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and strong logistical and political support from the Trump White House.

With Saudi Arabia's dominance over the Sunni Muslim world, financial and political support for anti-American and anti-Israel terror groups has been cut significantly. Even the usually radically anti-Israeli Arab League just voted not to oppose the Israel-UAE peace deal over the objections of the Palestinian Authority. Thus, the supposedly insurmountable road block we've long been told stops any hope for reducing war in the Middle East and terror all over the world is no longer such a road block after all.

Not all of the improved outlook for America and the Middle East is the result of peace deals. The Trump administration's laser-focused pursuit of its mission to defeat ISIS and wipe out its leader Abu Bakr al Baghddadi had a lot to do with it as well. So did the wise decision to take out Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corp leader Qassem Soleimani, who was long the world's worst terror army leader.

To sum up: on this September 11th, America is less threatened by Islamist terror and Israel and its Arab neighbors are starting to achieve wider and more meaningful peace deals.

That's all worth celebrating.

What's just as important to remember however, is that all of these positive developments are mostly in spite of the mess made by the initial responses to both 9/11 attacks by the two previous U.S. administrations.

First, the Bush administration's push for the Iraq War based on a flimsy claim of a threat from weapons of mass destruction led to a conflict that ended up bringing more chaos to the region, strengthened and emboldened Iran, and did not directly address any of the real elements that led to the 9/11/01 attacks.

Then, the Obama administration followed the war with policies that included a foolish appeasement of Iran and a dangerous playing down of the continuing threat of radical Islamist terror. Those policies manifested themselves most infamously with the ruinous 2015 Iran nuclear deal and the Obama administration's dishonest blaming of the 9/11/12 Benghazi attacks on a YouTube video.

In short, we're not in this better place today because of Presidents Bush or Obama, let alone any of their top advisers in the White House, Pentagon, or the CIA.

Now, the Bush and Obama records weren't 100% bad. Saddam Hussein is gone thanks to the Bush administration and so is al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden thanks to the Obama team, (with the exception of former Vice President Joe Biden, who advised against eliminating him). But both administrations squandered many of the positives that should have come from those take downs.

No one should shed any tears for the removal of Saddam from power and his justifiable execution. But the dominance Iran has exercised in Iraq since the end of the war shouldn't have surprised anybody. The bottom line is that the massive blood and treasure lost because of the invasion and regime change in Iraq are not the reasons the U.S. or the wider region is in better shape than before 2001.

This truth became more and more evident over the last decade and played a big role in the destruction of the Republican Party's brand on a national platform. Sure, GOP candidates for Congress and governors' mansions remained viable and even got a major shot in the arm in 2010 and 2014 as a check on the Obama administration's fumbles. But the longer term results from the Iraq War stripped the Republicans of their historically powerful foreign policy advantage that always gave GOP presidential candidates the edge when national security was a major issue with the voters.

This was a key reason why then-candidate Donald Trump was able to so easily defeat his 16 Republican primary opponents in 2016. He set himself apart from that losing brand when he amplified his scornful opposition to the Iraq War and his denigration for all those politicians and generals who pushed for it and carried it out.

Sure, plenty of Democrats and leftists had said the same things for years. But having a Republican candidate, and a national celebrity besides, lead a renewed chorus of boos for the war was obviously a bridge too far for the establishment GOP powers and the entrenched military and intelligence complex.

It's Trump criticisms of the Iraq War that are the real reason for former President George W. Bush's disdain for him, not the relatively light jabs Trump took at his brother Jeb during the 2016 primaries. Similarly, it's the fact that Trump has added weight to the claims that the intelligence community lied or failed to find the truth about pumped up claims of Iraqi WMD's that has so many current and former CIA and Pentagon spooks so spooked about him, not any supposed lack of fitness for office.

Every time Trump makes these criticisms, it becomes more likely that the public will accept the fact that so many current and former establishment Republicans and Defense Department types have significant blood on their hands from a war that yielded few direct positives. We honor those who fell in the Iraq War, but President Trump has being doing it not by continuing to defend the war itself. He's also continuing his plans to carry more troop withdrawals from Iraq and Afghanistan.

This unique and effective way to show respect for the lives of our soldiers and veterans is likely the reason why Trump's opponents have lately been pushing canards about his supposed lack of respect for the wounded and killed in action. It's such a transparent response, it's amazing even the biggest Trump-haters continue to fall for it.

But now to the Obama team's post-9/11 foibles. After taking out bin Laden in 2011, the Obama team clearly wanted to push the impression that al Qaeda and other radical Islamist threats were mostly a thing of the past. It was that desire to play down organized and sophisticated terror attacks that played a big role in then-National Security Adviser Susan Rice's outrageous lie that the Benghazi attacks were the result of a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video on the Internet. Those sentiments were also behind President Obama's infamous mischaracterization of ISIS as the "JV team."

Even before the Benghazi attacks, Obama's closest advisers were working hard to improve ties with Iran by pushing what eventually became the 2015 Iran nuclear deal. But none of those efforts made things better in the region. The determined march to the deal first led Obama to tragically ignore the widespread pro-democracy protests in Iran that were brutally put down by Tehran in 2009. Preserving the deal also led the Obama team to nix crucial investigations of pro-Iranian terror activities here in the U.S., as a blockbuster expose in Politico revealed in 2017.

The deal itself was no bargain either, as it freed up billions of dollars for the mullahs who almost immediately used that money to promote more killing in the Syrian and Yemeni civil wars and terror attacks all over the world. The kicker is there's plenty of evidence the Iran deal did nothing to slow or curb its march to nuclear weapons anyway.

President Trump's unrepentant push to take the U.S. out of the Iran deal played a major role in bolstering the Israeli-Saudi efforts against. It thus helped bring those two nations closer together and closer to the U.S. It's no coincidence that shortly after President Trump began the process of exiting the Iran deal, Prince bin Salman began to purge his kingdom of its worst anti-American and anti-Jewish clerics. These were many of the same clerics who encouraged and inspired the 9/11 hijackers.

So while the Bush administration's immediate reaction to 9/11/01 didn't have a directly positive impact, and the Obama administration's response to 9/11/12 decidedly made things worse, the Trump administration has helped speed positive change for Arab nations, Israel, and America's position in the Middle East as a whole.

There is still the matter of the Iranian threat to deal with, and Syria is still a humanitarian disaster. But now there is a clear path to true peace with plenty of mileposts already checked off on the way.

We must never forget the sacrifices our brave soldiers, first responders, and ordinary citizens made on and after 9/11/01 and 9/11/12. But the best way to honor their sacrifice is to learn from the Bush and Obama mistakes, and continue along the wiser path President Trump has set before us.