Independent Institute,
Incredible as it may seem, despite the 9/11 commission's conclusion that Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein had no “collaborative relationship,” President Bush and Vice President Cheney continue to insist that there was a “relationship.” The president and vice president are calling a few meetings between members of the terrorist group and Iraqi government officials a “relationship.” But by analogy, if a charity was able to arrange an appointment with a large corporation or foundation in an attempt to get a contribution but then ultimately got rejected in its solicitation, the Bush administration's logic would conclude that the charity and the corporation had established a philanthropic relationship. A similar outcome apparently occurred between Al Qaeda and the Iraqis. According to the commission, Osama bin Laden requested a haven for his training camps and help in buying weapons, but the Iraqis apparently never responded. That doesn't sound like much of a relationship.
All of the Bush administration's quibbling about the definition of the word “relationship” is as ridiculous as President Clinton's hair-splitting over the definition of the word “is” during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. When a president's justification for actions taken hinges on the definition of a single word, that usually spells trouble.
If mere meetings between functionaries are sinister, then U.S. envoy Donald Rumsfeld's friendly meeting in the early 1980s with Saddam Hussein, just after Saddam had used poison gas against the Iranians, may take the prize.
Conveniently, just when the president is in dire need of something to cloud the whole issue, Vladimir Putin, the Russian president who is seeking to curry favor with the only remaining superpower, claims that Russian intelligence services warned the United States after 9/11 that Saddam Hussein was planning terrorist attacks against U.S. targets. Putin's statement did nothing to address actual Iraqi-sponsored anti-U.S. attacks, which strangely were never carried out, or Iraq's relationship with Al Qaeda or the 9/11 attacks. It only muddied the waters during a critical time when the 9/11 panel reached the devastating conclusion (for the Bush administration) that no collaborative relationship existed between Iraq and Al Qaeda. One wonders, after information from Ahmed Chalabi and his anti-Saddam group proved false and may have been concocted in Iran, whether we should put much faith in intelligence supplied by the former KGB.
But we must not lose sight of the larger questions. First, do a few meetings between members of Al Qaeda and officials from the government of Iraq justify the invasion of that sovereign nation? Only operational cooperation between the Iraqi government and Al Qaeda in orchestrating the 9/11 attack would provide a justification for retaliation. And the president, vice president and Condoleezza Rice, the president's national security advisor, have all admitted that no link between Iraq and the 9/11 attack exists.
Second, past statements by Bush administration officials seem to be flatly false. Vice President Cheney, on at least one occasion, did link Iraq and 9/11, noting that “if we're successful in Iraq
