When this idea came to mind not long ago, it gave me a chuckle, and so I thought I might share it. I won't claim, however, that it's totally original -- I may simply have heard it years ago from a progressive talk show host like Thom Hartmann or Sam Seder and I just don't remember that I did, so if you've heard this one already, feel free to criticize. Anyway, to put it in a form that Alex Trebek could appreciate: Can you name the Bush/Cheney administration's 2 biggest screw-ups?
So there you have the real connection between Iraq and 9/11. Given the huge numbers of people who suffered and died as a result of those screw-ups, the chuckle doesn't last long, and has a dark edge to it. The thought arose, though, as I mulled over the implications of a recent Mother Jones article I'd read that explains why Jeb Bush can't seem to answer any questions about Iraq.
The MoJo article centers around Paul Wolfowitz, who acted as one of the chief architects of the Bush/Cheney adventure in Iraq. Evidently, Mr. W. took his national security cues, at least in part, from a book by a Harvard professor centering around a grand theory that could be titled Saddam Did It All. And by all, this professor meant not just 9/11, but also the year 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, the 1998 Embassy bombings in Africa, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Not having read the book, but only the MoJo article, I don't know if the professor also connected Saddam to D.B. Cooper or the Zodiac Killer, but I would guess all Mr. Hussein's crimes, according to this Harvard author, occurred after the Iran/Iraq war ended in 1988, since, as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark reminded us in his book The Fire This Time, Saddam only became an enemy of the U.S. after he stopped killing Iranians.
While such grand unifying connections might exist on rare occasions, this one greatly strains the bounds of believability to those of us who live in the reality-based community that the Bush administration spoke of with such disdain. The theory doesn't make much logical sense, and doesn't fit basic facts, but it does explain much of what the Bush/Cheney bunch did. It explains the excitement they clearly showed when announcing Saddam's capture, which always seemed strange to me. It also explains so many of the Bush/Cheney missteps, from the failure to capture bin Laden when they had him cornered to the failure to plan for an occupation of Iraq following the end of armed conflict, and even to the failure to heed pre-9/11 intelligence warnings of an impending attack. If Saddam did it all, then capturing him would stop all the really bad things from happening.
Those of us in the reality-based community know that the real world doesn't work like this, even for those who want to build an empire and create their own reality by doing so. Older right-wingers sometimes seem to miss the old Soviet Union because during the Cold War it functioned as a unifying enemy. The fall of the evil empire left behind a world that's much too complex to fit their simplistic evil vs. good formula. However, because they only see the world through that 2-toned lens, they connect the dots and tie together those who have become adversaries of the U.S., with no understanding of the forces that drive those adversaries. The bad guys must hate us for our freedoms, and not because we steal their oil and drop bombs on their heads, simply because they're bad guys, and not real people with real reasons for doing what they do. Timothy McVeigh had a much different motivation for detonating his truck bomb than the Ramzi Yousef bunch did when they detonated theirs, but right-wingers need to tie them all together and link them to Saddam because that view can fit into the right-wing mind, whereas the complex reality cannot.
So therein lies Jeb Bush's dilemma. He believes in this bogus Saddam connection to 9/11, as do, evidently, his brother, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and the core of Dubya's national security contingent, as well as others from the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) crowd and the like, but what can he say when the liberal (fact-based) media comes around with their gotcha questions about Iraq? If he tells them the truth, he knows they'll rip him to shreds because he can't back it up with facts, yet he doesn't want to deny the truth because he wants to give potential voters a sign that he knows the truth just as they do, and if they elect him for the big national security job, he'll keep them safe from the same phantoms that they all believe in, since he believes in those phantoms as well. The truth is that the real connection between Saddam and 9/11 exists only in the minds of a delusional Harvard professor, the Bush brothers, Cheney, Wolfowitz and other right-wingers, but unfortunately, the bad decisions that these types make based on such delusions can have catastrophic real-world consequences, and that's a fact.