No. The administration repeatedly tried to tie Saddam to a future 9/11 type attack that would be even worse in that it would involved chemical, biological or nukyular (sic) weapons. That’s what your cites show, and that’s what the record shows. I think it was largely disingenuous for them to do that, but they did not try to tie Saddam specifically to the 9/11 attacks themselvs.
Once again I must say that the truth of the matter is bad enough, and one needn’t fabricate word association game to prove that they mishandled Iraq. You’ve got a nice little “just so” story that allows you “prove” your theory by the mere proximity of 9/11 and Saddam in some speech or another. That doesn’t cut it.
“Well, what we now have that’s developed since you and I last talked, Tim, of course, was that report that – it’s been pretty well confirmed that [Mohammed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence service in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the [9/11] attack.”
– Dick Cheney, Meet the Press, 12/9/01
“If we’re successful in Iraq… we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11.”
– Dick Cheney, Meet The Press, 9/14/03
“I think there’s overwhelming evidence that there was a connection between al-Qaeda and the Iraqi government. We’ve discovered since documents indicating that a guy named Abdul Rahman Yasin, who was a part of the team that attacked the World Trade Center in '93, when he arrived back in Iraq was put on the payroll and provided a house, safe harbor and sanctuary. That’s public information now. So Saddam Hussein had an established track record of providing safe harbor and sanctuary for terrorists.”
– Dick Cheney, Morning Edition, NPR, 1/22/04
There was a statement that M.A. met with an Iraqi official in Prague in (IIRC) 1998. That’s a pretty tenuous relationship, if it ever happened at all (IIRC, it was determined later to be “of dubious veracity”), but that info came from the Czechs themselves, not from Bush’s administration. Bush is indeed desperate to tie Saddam to terrorism, and to imply that fighting Saddam is all part of the WoT, but I think it’s a stretch to say that he tried to link Saddam to the specific events of 9/11.
It’s certainly possible that Bush tried to imply Saddam ordered (or was directly tied to) 9/11, and he doesn’t seem to have gone out of his way to make sure Americans didn’t believe that. But, frankly, my hypothesis fits the facts given as good or better than BobLibDem’s hypothesis. In order to favor Bob’s hypothesis, you’d need to have better data than he’s presented so far or you’d need to be predisposed to believe it over other explanations. If someone wants to claim that Bob’s hypothesis is true because Bush is lying scumbag who can’t be trusted, then I’ll pass on getting into that discussion.
the cites that rjung posted have Cheney linking it up. I dont give a rats ass where the (false) info originally came from, when it was given to the American public, it was given by the fucking VP, linking one of the main 9/11 terrorists w/“senior official” of Iraqi intelligence a ‘few months’ before 9/11. That’s a claim they made, linking 9.11 and IRaq. No other way to interpret it John.
Well, at the time we did think that was something that did happen. But I can see that you accidentally left off the rest of what Cheney said. Let me fix that for you (empahsis added):
Yep, those are just like the rest of BobLibDem’s quotes. An attempt to tie Saddam Hussein to terrorists like the ones who perpetrated the events of 9/11/01, al Qaeda in particular. Of course the reference to Yasin was pretty bogus, since it seems that he was more a prisoner in Iraq than someone who was provided sanctuary.
I disagree. While it’s true that the administration never directly came out and said that Saddam was responsible, they’ve implied it very heavily in the quotes that have been presented here. What else could be implied when you state that the terrorists flying the planes were staying in Iraq or meeting with Iraqi officials.
The administration did try to link Saddam with a future 9/11 style attack. That’s what added the zip to their WMD claims. That does not mean that they didn’t try to link Saddam with 9/11 as well.
And before this gets lost in the shuffle, do we have any cites on who has been saying that the terrorists would be satisfied if we left Iraq? Surely if Elmer Fudd is saying it, it must have some basis in fact right?
Its one of those quibble points, like Bush “lied”, that tie some of us up into serpentine semantic contortions. Can’t prove Bush “lied” without a signed confession, preferably in blood, and an affidavit from God Almighty confirming it. Hence, anyone who publicly states that Bush lied is a hysterical rabid moonbat
Similar smoke and mirrors excercise here. The level of proof is raised to the implausible, even though a common sense evaluation leads one directly to the conclusion: the Bushiviks at the very least implied a connection they had reason to believe was exaggerated. As in knew, or should have known.
I have also heard recurrent references by our own troops as to feeling as though the attack on Saddam was “revenge” for 9/11. Now, wherever did they get such a notion?
Do the terrorists only get to have one reason to hate us? Is there a quota?
“That hatred existed before we invaded Iraq, and that is what caused 9/11.” I agree with that. However, it’s irrelevant to the argument that Cheney is addressing.
Cheney is trying to counter the argument that the U.S. presence is Iraq is making the U.S. security situation worse. If I’m being attacked by bees, and start kicking a hornet’s nest, even if I had the best of intentions and thought the bees were coming from the hornet’s nest, does it make any sense at all to say
“Those who argue that I’ve kicked a hornet’s nest are overlooking a fundamental fact: I was attacked by bees even before I started kicking. To stop kicking now would be a ruinous blow to my health and security.”
And yet, somehow a lot of Americans ended up believing that Saddam was involved with Al Qaeda and September 11. Are you saying that there’s no relationship between that error and the way the administration discussed the two issues?
We *were * in Saudi Arabia on 9/11 and the Saudi terrorists did hit us because of it. But, as the “Man of La Mancha” script says, “Don’t let facts get in the way of Truth!”
It’s sad that there are still people making the claim, even here, that trying to make people believe something while knowing it not to be true is *not * lying.
Well, I already said that they made no effort to dispell that piece of misinformation, so there probably is some relationship. But there are so many things that Americans are ignorant about, so I wouldn’t be surprised if many of them would believe there was a link no matter what Bush said. In fact, Bush has finally come out and flat out said there was no link, yet many still think there was. It would be interesting to see a poll that asked this question: President Bush has recently said there was no link between Saddam and the events of 9/11. Do you think there was? What do you think the results would show?
But here in this thread - and throughout the last few years - we have Cheney making the same implications. If I had to guess, I’d say that these things are being delegated to Cheney so he can communicate them to the party base while Bush avoids having to do it.
It’d be interesting to see those numbers now. When polls asked that question in years past, the answers were depressing.
But those quotes are attempts to tie Saddam to al Qaeda or the WoT in general, not the specific plot on 9/11. If I had to guess, I’d say they perhaps wanted to tie Saddam to 9/11 early on, but realized they would get called on their lame attempts to do so then tried to say, in effect, that it didn’t matter, that Saddam had links to al Qaeda even if he wasn’t involved in 9/11. It’s all the same fight because, well, because… Zarquawi was in Iraq and all those al Qaeda types are there now and we have to fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.
The one instance when Cheney did have what he might have thought were “the goods” to tie Saddam directly to 9/11 (Atta, in Prague, with the candlestick), he explicitly said that he didn’t know if the tie was there (you know, that part of the quote **rjung **accidentally left off from his cite). And let’s be serious here… if Cheney wanted to plant a thought in the mindless masses, Meet the Press would be the last place to do it. Only news geeks like me watch that program, and we listen carefully to what the guests say, not what they might want to imply.
I see. So we should just regard this as one of those mysteries, an idea sprung full grown in the imagination of the public?
Wish I had your cheerful nature, John, barefoot boy, cheek of tan. You see an innocent coincidence, that just happens to be of enormous benefit to some of the most ruthless cynics ever to claw their way to power. Is there perhaps a Providential hand in all of this?
The only problem is, with Iraq breaking down into factional war, politics scarcely matters. It’s like getting to choose the decor for your bedroom while your house is burning down.
A great many Iraqis have chosen the power that comes from the barrel of a gun, and that unfortunately negates these other choices.
Any Republicans want to wave that purple finger now?
And every year we’ve helped, things have gotten visibbly worse for the Iraqi people.
It’s easy to say shit, and these guys are good at it.
Apparently we failed to give people that power.
And from the beginning, we needed a few hundred thousand more troops to ‘stand with our friends’ if this venture was to stand a chance. But we weren’t willing to pay that price.
By doing things in less than half measures, we didn’t so much stand with our friends; we fucked them over.
Too bad we didn’t support it nearly enough to give it a chance. So we have betrayed both our ideals and our security in Iraq.
If only we had them doing this in the service of a noble and worthwhile cause.
The very fact that we view the Sunni insurgents as ‘the enemy’ is part of the problem. We’re not going to militarily defeat the Sunni population as a whole; in order for Iraq to have worked, we needed to have found a political solution that would have been more attractive to the Sunnis than supporting the insurgency. We never did; AFAICT,we never tried that hard.
Ah yes, the Iraqi forces, many of which are this or that faction (especially the Badr Corps) in Iraqi uniform. The Iraqi forces, that were unable to keep a British base from being looted down to the bricks when the British turned it over to them the other day, in one of Iraq’s least troublesome provinces.
And the commanders on the ground are apparently warned not to ask for more troops. (It’s not like there are any more troops to send, anyway. We’ve already sent training units, we’ve got Naval forces doing ground duty, we’ve called up thousands from the Individual Ready Reserve.)
Again, that word ‘victory.’ We’re not going to win anything that looks like ‘victory.’ At this point, it would be progress if Maliki turned into a Shi’ite version of Saddam, and restored order by force and fear.
That’s neither necessary nor possible. What you posted has no relation to anything I or Cheney said - it is a mere strawman. You made something up and tried to assign it to me.
My rule of thumb is when someone has to construct a strawman argument, it is usually because they cannot find any honest way to dispute an argument. When they have to stretch as far as you have, it is a fairly obvious concession.
OK, cite some hard figures. Keeping in mind that the number 2 guy in al-Queda was drawn into Iraq by the invasion - and killed there. He left behind a letter mentioning that the invasion was a significant factor in the downturn in morale in the al-Queda ranks. Low morale tends to equate to less recruiting, not more.
So, for the record, it would be fair to say that all of you are claiming that Iraq was involved in 9/11.
