PLAIN TRUTH?:

The Plain Truth (NY Times, June 17, 2004)

It's hard to imagine how the commission investigating the 2001 terrorist attacks could have put it more clearly yesterday: there was never any evidence of a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda...

So, since the Times considers the Commission's opinion to be dispositive, can we assume that having read this they'll apologize to the Administration:

"[T]here were connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's government." (Lee H. Hamilton, September 11th Commission Vice Chair, 6/17/04)

What about the dupes who fell for the Times's lies, Anti-anti-Saddamism (William Kristol, 06/28/2004, Weekly Standard)

PERHAPS JOHN KERRY simply made the mistake of believing what he read in the New York Times. There it was, the lead headline on Thursday, June 17: "Panel Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie." Or perhaps he read the Los Angeles Times headline: "No Signs of Iraq-Al Qaeda Ties Found." Or the Washington Post: "Al Qaeda-Hussein Link Is Dismissed." Or maybe he was watching CBS News the night before, as John Roberts explained that "one of President Bush's last surviving justifications for war in Iraq" took "a devastating hit" as the 9/11 Commission "put the nail in that connection" between Saddam and al Qaeda.

So Kerry pounced. No matter that this coverage ranged from tendentious to false. The Bush administration, he claimed, "misled America." "The administration took its eye off al Qaeda, took its eye off of the real war on terror in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan and transferred it for reasons of its own to Iraq." And "the United States of America should never go to war because it wants to; we should only go to war because we have to."

So we didn't have to go to war against Saddam, and (presumably) shouldn't have. After all, "the real war on terror" is in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan. And since the Bush administration, Kerry implies, knew perfectly well that there was no link between the "real" terrorists and Saddam Hussein, it went to war to remove Saddam only "because it want[ed] to." The New York Times reports, incidentally, that this last line, about the
administration "wanting" to go to war, is "one Mr. Kerry has been using with increasing frequency in campaign appearances," and is one that receives "loud applause." Why any administration should "want" to fight an unnecessary war Kerry does not explain. Or does Kerry now agree with his colleague Ted Kennedy that the Bush administration went to war because it knew it "was going to be good politically"?

This is surely a major moment in the presidential race. John Kerry had, until last week, been running a disciplined general election campaign, carefully suppressing his left-leaning foreign policy instincts, soberly emphasizing his commitment to fighting the war on terror and to seeing through the effort in Iraq. Then he couldn't resist the temptation to jump on the (misleading) press accounts of the (sloppy) 9/11 Commission staff report, in order to assault the Bush administration on the issue of terror links between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 18, 2004 10:07 PM