Home > The missing link
No matter what the Bush administration did or did not
say about it, it is now clear that Saddam Hussein was
not involved in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
and that any support for the Iraqi war based on the
assumption that he was involved was misplaced.
Misplaced, widely held and, most disturbingly, still
given life by the president himself.
Thursday, a day after the 9-11 commission announced its
detailed history of the attacks, President Bush repeated
his insinuation that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Osama bin
Laden’s al-Qaida were so closely linked that a horrible
crime committed by one justified an assault on the
other.
"The reason I keep insisting that there was a
relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al-Qaida," the
president told reporters Thursday, "is because there was
a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida."
A Harris poll shows that, two months ago, 49 percent of
the American people believed not only that such a
relationship existed, but also that it included active
Iraqi involvement in 9-11. But, despite administration
suggestions that began when the World Trade Center was
still smoldering, the only Saddam-Osama connection we
can find is a shared hatred of America.
One tantalizing clue pushed by war supporters was the
story that lead 9-11 hijacker Mohammad Atta had met some
high-ranking Iraqi spy in Prague in April 2001. But
Atta, U.S. spies have long known, was almost certainly
in the United States at the time.
Thus that allegation lands on the ash heap of recent
history, along with the African uranium that didn’t
exist, the mobile chemical weapons facilities that
turned out to be fire trucks, the Scud missile launchers
that turned out to be chicken coops, the oil wealth that
would pay for the reconstruction of Iraq and the rose
petals that would be strewn beneath our soldiers’ feet.
Give the White House its due. Rather than flatly say
that Saddam was behind 9-11, the administration has
always been given to squishier phrasings about how
Saddam was the sort of leader who would give al-Qaida
chemical weapons. Or that the official purpose of the
Iraq campaign was to root out threats, according to the
administration’s official pre-invasion report to
Congress, "including those nations, organizations, or
persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the
terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."
Such an explanation did justify the American overthrow
of Afghanistan’s Taliban regime. It could, perhaps, have
justified action against the Taliban’s patrons in
Pakistan or bin Laden’s bankers in Saudi Arabia.
But a good reason for invading Iraq? There may be one.
But it has nothing — nothing — to do with 9-11.