"A Very Thin Reed"

President George W. Bush, January 29, 2002: "Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror… States like [Iraq, Iran, and North Korea], and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world."

President Bush, September 11, 2002, cited on the connections between Iraq and terrorism: "That is not the angle they're exploring now. The angle they're exploring is the production of weapons of mass destruction."

Eight months after Bush, in his State of the Union Address, first began to use 9/11 to justify war on Iraq, the jig is up. Whatever the merit of such a war, the administration couldn't get a big square block to fit into a little round hole. The last known evidence of Iraq's supporting terrorist attacks against U.S. targets dates back to 1993, when Saddam Hussein plotted to assassinate George H.W. Bush during Bush's visit to Kuwait. Many intelligence officials have made clear that they have little or no hard evidence to link the Iraqi dictator to Al Qaeda. In one of the more confident assertions of the connection, a senior intelligence official told The Washington Post, "It's a very thin reed."

Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to Bush I and a chief Republican critic of war on Iraq, put it succinctly Monday on CNN's Inside Politics: "[S]uppose there had been no 9/11 attack at all. Saddam Hussein would still be doing exactly what he is doing. He is not a problem for us because of terrorism."

Some have rejected the idea that the executive branch would ever abuse 9/11 to erode liberties for purposes other than securing Americans from terrorism. But if the administration has used 9/11 as political hay to nourish support for war on Iraq, is such a scenario so unlikely?