PRESIDENT BUSH: SADDAM NOT LINKED TO 9/11
If you're one of the 69% of Americans that thinks Saddam Hussein was somehow involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, you should take note. Even President Bush has now explicitly conceded there is no evidence of such involvement. "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved in Sept. 11," Bush told reporters yesterday. Vice-President Cheney said "It's not surprising" that so many Americans believe in the Saddam-9/11 link.

Of course it's not surprising. It's administration itself that created this perception or, at best, allowed it to flourish. The president recently called Iraq a "central front" in the war on international terrorism and has liberally mixed in Saddam Hussein with rhetoric against al-Qaeda, the 9/11 plotters and other international terrorists. Naturally the American people, who instinctively want to believe and trust their leaders on questions of national security, are going to mis-comprehend things. If the people are presented incomplete information, naturally they are going to arrive at flawed conclusions.


It's nice the president got around to explicitly denying the Saddam-9/11 link. But isn't convenient he didn't state this, oh I don't know, in the State of the Union address or have Sec. Powell does so in his presentation to the United Nations? This little detail was omitted because this public mis-perception a cheap way to gain support for an Iraq invasion whose true goals were so dubious on their own merits. If the president had said, "Although Saddam wasn't involved in 9/11, we should still invade anyway because x, y and z," do you think pre-invasion support for the conquest would've dropped at least some? If it wouldn't have mattered, then why didn't they level with us beforehand?

Of course, if you were paying close attention and sifted through the bombast, machismo and borderline slanderous attacks on the patriotism of those who opposed the war, you knew that there was no tie between Saddam and 9/11. Even the president himself said there was no imminent threat posed by Saddam but that we must invade because we know he had bad weapons a long time ago and because he might conceivably, possibly pose a theoretical threat to Americans in one or five or 100 years.

We had an incredibly deceptive Democratic administration (though at least its primary deceit was about oral sex rather than war and empire) and it has beeen followed by an even more deceptive Republican administration. Isn't it time to explore other options?