[QUOTE=Shodan]
No, just the opposite. Cheney is saying that the attack on 9/11 did not occur because we were in Iraq.
What it means is that the reason terrorists hate us is not because we invaded Iraq. That hatred existed before we invaded Iraq, and that is what caused 9/11.
[/quote]
This absurd line of ‘reasoning’ is based on a recurring fallacy. Because it comes up so often, let me do the honors of naming it.
By the powers invested in me as President of Freedonia :D, I hereby decree it to be the “Lump of Terrorists” fallacy.
That is to say, it’s the fallacy that there are a certain fixed number of terrorists in the world, in the same manner that the Lump of Labor fallacy purportedly assumes that there’s a fixed amount of work in the world that needs to be done.
Unfortunately (given the way the Bush Administration approaches the world), this is in fact a fallacy. The 9/11 terrorists were of course mad at us before Iraq, but needless to say, a whole bunch of people who had no beef with us five years ago, do now on account of what we have done in Iraq.
Rumsfeld, in one of his lucid moments a few years back, wondered aloud if we were creating new terrorists faster than we were killing terrorists already in existence. Of course we are, and as long as we’re occupying Iraq and making a total hash of it, that will continue to be the case.
Leaving Iraq should reduce the rate at which we create more terrorists: if we leave Iraq in 2007, few will become terrorists in 2009 on account of our receding involvement in Iraq.
If there were a fixed number of terrorists in the world, then the question of whether leaving Iraq would satisfy them would be germane. But since our presence and actions in Iraq are turning people into terrorists, it’s a pretty stupid question.
If that helps you forget about the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians killed since the statue fell, then I guess you need to repeat this mantra frequently.