| Wednesday, June 29, 2005 |
| (Don't) believe the hype |
It never ceases to amaze me, four years on and multiple investigations and commissions later -- and even an admission by the president -- how many on the right continue to cling to the unsupported, almost desperate, believe that Saddam Hussein was involved in the planning of 9/11. Powerpundit celebrates the supposed juicy finds of SoCal pundit, and I just gave up on Jawa... Guys, the 9/11 link is a Rovian rhetorical flourish designed to sell the war and pump up Bush's poll numbers. You're not supposed to actually believe it...
Update: at least one Jawa has jumped off the Iraq-9/11 bandwagon... I'm not going to bother quoting the Center for American Progress or any other Dem-linked or "liberal" group. Let's go to Paul "for the love of God PLEASE let's invade Iraq" Wolfowitz, from the year 2003:
8/06/03: (Information Clearing House) Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz, one of the main architects for the war in Iraq, admitted for the first time that Iraq had nothing to do with the September 11 terrorist attacks, contradicting public statements made by senior White House and Pentagon officials whose attempt to link Saddam Hussein and the terrorist organization al-Qaeda was cited by the Bush administration as one of the main reasons for launching a preemptive strike in March against Iraq.
In an interview with conservative radio personality Laura Ingraham, Wolfowitz was asked when he first came to believe that Iraq was behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks.
“I’m not sure even now that I would say Iraq had something to do with it,” Wolfowitz said in the interview, aired Friday, a transcript of which can be found at http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030801-depsecdef0526.html
Wolfowitz’s answer confirms doubts long held by critics of the Iraq war that the Bush administration had no evidence linking Iraq to 9-11 or al-Qaeda, but simply used the horrific terrorist attacks as a reason to overthrow Saddam Hussein and his Baathist regime.
“I think what the realization to me is -- the fundamental point was that terrorism had reached the scale completely different from what we had thought of it up until then. And that it would only get worse when these people got access to weapons of mass destruction which would be only a matter of time,” Wolfowitz said in the interview. “…What you really got to do is, eliminate terrorist networks and eliminate terrorism as a problem. And clearly Iraq was one of the country -- you know top of the list of countries actively using terrorism as an instrument of national policy.”
That's exactly the same line of reasoning presented to myself and a group of editorial writers during a fellowship program in D.C. in December, 2003. We had the chance to ask questions of Douglas Feith and Stephen Cambone among others, and I personally put the question to Mr. Feith, about Iraq and the neoconservative desire to invade it before 9/11. His answer was that the invasion was not launched because Iraq was involved in 9/11, but because "9/11 changed the context in which we view Iraq," with the idea being that the U.S. wanted to diffuse Iraq as a potential supplier of wmd to terrorists.
Now, you can buy that argument or not, but no responsible government official -- not even George "bloody shirt" Bush himself, will go on the record saying Iraq planned 9/11 ... well, except this guy... and Cheney (but who believes anything he says anymore... last throes... give me a break...)
Clearly, nothing would be more beneficial to George W. Bush than to have clear and convincing evidence that Saddam Hussein was behind the Sept 11 terror attacks -- that belief, after all, is what propped up American support for the war for more than two years -- and the erosion of that belief, along with the failure to find wmd and the mounting insurgency and casualties, is what turned Americans sour. If Bush had the goods, he wouldn't just imply an Iraq-9/11 link as he did in his speech last night and as he and his spokespeople continue to do, he would outright make the claim. Instead, he repeatedly has stated that the opposite is true.
This case is closed, except in the minds of the most virulent neocons and Bush supporters. They've pushed the argument to the absurd point where Democrats like me choose to believe the president on this and they DON'T! |
posted by JReid @ 8:34 PM   |
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