Coup du Jour

The Bush team's spin patrol must be getting dizzy. First we had Vice President Dick Cheney giving us a rather interesting tale of close al Qaeda work with Iraq dating back a decade and pronouncing Iraq "the geographic base of terrorism. " Then Condi Rice slightly amended that to the Middle East being "a region from which the 9-11 threat emerged," a horseshoe pit still big enough to justify the invasion of Iraq.

But then Rummy got into the act to express bafflement that two-thirds of the American people think Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Gee, Don could it be cuz we blew the Hell out of his country and zippered his creepy-ass sons, displaying the carcasses like we'd bagged Agog and Magog? That sort of thing makes an impression on your average American.

If this is confusing, don't worry. It'll all change by tomorrow.

Comments

[Dan]

two-thirds of the American people think Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Gee, Don could it be cuz we blew the Hell out of his country and zippered his creepy-ass sons

Given that the majority of Americans were under the mistaken impression that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks long before we ever invaded the country, Jeff, I’d have to say that the answer to your question is “no”.

[R.C. Dean]

Really, folks, most of the charges about “Bush lied” don’t have anything to do with anything he actually said, or anyone in his administration actually said. Rather, most of these claims are based on second or third hand hearsay, misquotes, or intentional misrepresentations of what was actually said. The classics have to do with claimsthat Bush said the war is over when he was on the aircraft carrier (he said “major combat” is over, and was correct), and the SOTU kerfuffle about African uranium (perfectly accurate as phrased, accurate as intended, but he never said anything about uranium from Neezhair in reliance on forged documents, as the Bush haters often claim).

Similarly, Bush never claimed Saddam was an imminent threat. In fact, he said just the opposite: if you will recall, the big controversy was over whether we were justified in preemptive war against a non-imminent threat. As for the meeting in Prague, Jude Wanniski is the one peddling lies when he pretends that the current Czech position is that no meeting ever took place. The Czechs waffled a bit, but right now they are standing by their original story.

Read the damn Cheney interview. He is very careful to say that there is no direct link known to us between Saddam and 9/11. Russert tries to put that in his mouth and gets slapped down. Cheney does note that there are ties between al Qaeda and Saddam, but is very careful in how he characterizes those ties and the state of our knowledge. If he’s lying, he’s doing an incredibly bad job of it because any lies he is telling are so carefully hedged as to by utterly uncompelling.

[Brady]

I just want to make clear that there is no doubt that the Bush admin are responsible for making references linking Iraq and 9/11.

The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001 — and still goes on.
Remarks by the President from the USS Abraham Lincoln

Even if the president toyed with words in speeches without exactly saying there is a definite link, the intention of his speeches were to impress upon our minds the link. This is political spin by the WH, not a media spin:

WASHINGTON ? In his prime-time press conference last week, which focused almost solely on Iraq, President Bush mentioned Sept. 11 eight times. He referred to Saddam Hussein many more times than that, often in the same breath with Sept. 11.

Bush never pinned blame for the attacks directly on the Iraqi president. Still, the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persists among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks.
The impact of Bush linking 9/11 and Iraq

Don’t insult me with your boohoo bullshit, Dan. If you are an uncritical, thoughtless zombie who has no problems with our government misleading the people of the United States, you are the infant. One without principles, at that.

Whether or not the war was justified is an entirely different conversation. First of all, you would have to give me a reason why it was justified, and seeing that many of the reasons we were given (WMD, 9/11 link, etc) are being retracted you may have a hard time doing so. Additionally, even if there was a higher truth, you will have to explain to me how the people of the US are to swallow the fact that the reasons given were subverted in bullshit.

I’m no freaking neo-hippie, and I thought the Aghan war was the right action. But, when you have a definite threat in al-Queda, why would you turn your focus to a “non-immenent” threat who is unrelated to 9/11?

[Mike]

For all of the people that keep saying it was worth it just to get rid of Saddam, I have to ask was it worth $166 billion? Plus another $55 billion we’re seeking (and not going to get) from other countries?

[PapayaSF]

Frankly, you “Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11” folks puzzle me, and I’m glad you weren’t around 60 years ago. On 12/7/41, Pearl Harbor was bombed by Japan, and what did the US do in ’42? Why, we invaded North Africa to fight the Vichy French, the Germans, and the Italians! It makes no sense, *unless* you look at the bigger picture, folks. Give it a try.

Mentioning Iraq and 9/11 ‘in the same breath’ is not a lie nor even misleading. Sheesh.

And I’ll bet that some significant portion of the US public in 1943 thought the Germans had something to do with Pearl Harbor, too. That doesn’t mean fighting Germany was wrong.

[thoreau]

We’re invading Iraq because Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.

(a little later)

Hussein will soon have weapons of mass destruction.

(a little later)

Hussein had weapons of mass destruction programs.

(later)

Hussein might have given them to terrorists, so we won’t find the weapons. The terrorists will wait a long time to use them.

(later)

We invaded Iraq to fight the terrorists on their own ground.

.
.
.
.

(a long time later)

Four legs good, two legs bad!

(later)

Four legs good, two legs better!

(later)

We’re invading Iraq with the support of Eastasia. Eastasia has always been our ally.

(later)

Iraq is supporting our invasion of Eastasia. Eastasia has always been our ally.

[thoreau]

Um, I meant to say in the last one:

“Iraq is supporting our invasion of Eastasia. Iraq has always been our ally.”

[Thomas]

I wonder where people have been for the last 2 years. I mean, I’ve never heard the president or anyone in the administration suggest that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. Perhaps people have made a rather bizarre mistake–thinking that when Bush referred to 9/11 he was referring to Iraq’s supposed role in the attack, rather than correctly understanding that Bush was referring to our tolerance for risk after 9/11. It’s either stupidity or bad faith.

[Anonymous]

surely this will come as a great surprise to the folks over at the corner who INSIST he had something to do with 9/11:

http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/03_08_31_corner-archive.asp

[Ayatollah Usoe]

Why shouldn’t the American people be as confused as our president when it comes to finding O’Saddama?

[Brady]

This is HUGE. I can only hope that America shows its intolerance to this administration in ’04. Re-electing an administration that so blatently lies in the face of the American public would be one of the great democratic tragedies in the world’s history. That a mass number of people could willingly accept being misguided by its leadership speaks very low of us as a people.

The fact that millions of people can relinquish their principles by the president greasing their hands with a tax cut is sickening. Our president is waging wars under false pretenses, giving tax cuts while increasing spending so your children can flip the bill, and twisting the law to rip away your civil rights. Somehow you can justify this because he’ll give you a few extra dollars in the short-term? Sell-outs.

[PapayaSF]

Kevin,

No, I don’t buy the “FDR conspired us into war” idea. And all Pearl Harbor-level disasters, seen in retrospect, involve “ignored evidence” that shouldn’t have been. This is standard bureaucratic misjudgment/confusion/inertia, not perfidity.

Your second point, though, is new to me and very interesting, though not surprising. Of course, if the whole world (save our hemisphere) were under the control of hostile empires, it *would* be disastrous, whether in 1940 or now. So I don’t see it as evidence for your initial point.

[Frenk]

To PapayaSF and R.C. Dean, in particular, I would point out that this is in no way, shape, or form a non-issue. Rumsfeld himself just went on the record saying that he will “exaggerate for effect.” Sure, it ain’t POTUS, but it sure as shooting is the administration’s main pro-war spokesman.

Heck, by Rumsfeld’s measure, I guess we should consider Clinton’s b.j. depositions as “understating for effect.”

[James Martin]

Papaya, Thomas: To clear up your wonderment; I think I understand them–and they make me angry:

1. There are a heck of a lot of people who have a sizable emotional investment in being against President Bush at all costs, even at the cost of their grip on reality. If we’re living in 1984, Bush is Emmanuel Goldstein. Honestly, I’m disappointed to see such purveyors of irrational hatred on the staff of Reason magazine.

2. In order to keep up their hostility toward Bush, the pathologicals have to carefully channel their thoughts. If they ever permit it to occur to them that the the response to 9/11 consists, or ought to consist, of anything beyond the capture/destruction of those particular cells of the one particular organization that staged that one particular attack, their whole intellectual house of cards comes down. Accordingly, there can’t be any lessons to be learned or policy shifts to be made, or any broad anti-American or terrorist enemy. There is only al-Qaeda.

3. The whole Hussein-9/11 linkage (as distinct from the very real Hussein/al-Qaeda linkage) was perpetuated as a straw man by the Tim Russerts of the world, with which to prey among the ignorant and gullible. That’s why Rummy had to correct him. He knew exactly what Russert was doing, and he didn’t let him do it.

4. The straw man won the argument (which tells you something about these people’s credibility), which is where the 70%-believe poll came from.

5. So, now, they’re trying to bash Bush for “retracting” a statement he never made in the first place.

It’s dishonest. It’s contemptible. Shame on you, Tim Cavanaugh. Shame on you, Jeff A. Taylor. Reason readers deserve better.

[Kevin Carson]

PapayaSF,

Part of the “big picture” is that FDR had been trying to maneuver the American people into a war with both Germany and Japan. There is a substantial body of evidence that he deliberately maneuvered Japan into initiating hostilities, and knowingly ignored evidence that a “surprise” attack was coming. Before you dismiss this as “tinfoil hat” stuff, I challenge you to read Stinnett’s *Day of Deceit*. It’s based on a lot of recently declassified documents.

Following the fall of Western Europe in 1940, the CFR and State Department did a series of joint studies to determine the amount of the world’s resources the U.S. economy would need to survive in its existing form. They concluded that if the U.S. was cut off from the markets and resources of Fortress Europe and the Co-Prosperity Sphere, the results would be disastrous. The postwar economic order, including the Bretton Woods system and Marshall Plan were direct outgrowths of their findings.

Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter. “Shaping a New World Order: The Council on Foreign Relations’ Blueprint for World Hegemony, 1939-1945” in Holly Sklar, ed., Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management (Boston: South End Press, 1980) pp. 135-156.

[Ken Keller]

By the way… the U.S. did not declare war on Germany first. They responded to Germany’s declaration of war.

While it is certainly possible that people in power were looking at the bigger picture, they were doing so while considering entering a two front war already in full flower. Note in the President’s Message quoted below how critical he thought this challenge was.

Were there any other nations not yet in the war (of those who would ultimately be)?

On the morning of Dec. 11 the Government of Germany, pursuing its course of world conquest, declared war against the United States. The long-known and the long-expected has thus taken place. The forces endeavoring to enslave the entire world now are moving toward this hemisphere. Never before has there been a greater challenge to life, liberty and civilization. Delay invites great danger. Rapid and united effort by all of the peoples of the world who are determined to remain free will insure a world victory of the forces of justice and of righteousness over the forces of savagery and of barbarism. Italy also has declared war against the United States.