Quotes of the Day

Bush administration officials appeared unusually concerned, this week, to distance themselves from the suggestion that Saddam Hussein had any connection to the September 11 terror attacks. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and President Bush himself all went on record stressing that there was no evidence linking Iraq to the attacks — despite the fact that 70 percent of Americans believe Saddam was involved. That erroneous belief may, of course, be one reason for the administration's sudden concern to set the record straight. Because, as Vice President Dick Cheney put it on Sunday, "it's not surprising that people make that connection." Indeed, although the Bush administration never actually claimed that Saddam Hussein was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks, those attacks were seldom absent from the prewar speeches of administration officials making the case for an invasion. Critics of the administration maintain that the White House's own prewar rhetoric encouraged the misconception, and certainly did little to discourage it. Indeed, when he proclaimed victory over Saddam on May 1, President Bush said, "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11, 2001... The liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the campaign against terror... We have not forgotten the victims of September the 11th — the last phone calls, the cold murder of children, the searches in the rubble. With those attacks, the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got."

Unlike his administration colleagues, Cheney last weekend didn't actually conclude that Saddam wasn't involved. He cited a number of alleged connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda — some of them hotly disputed — and concluded, simply, that "we just don't know." And, if anything, he stuck fast to the suggestion that the invasion of Iraq was a response to 9/11, characterizing it as "a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11." Condi Rice made a similar point in her own remarks debunking the notion that Saddam was directly involved, saying the Iraqi dictator was targeted because he posed a danger in "the region from which the 9/11 attacks emerged."

There are a number of possible reasons why the administration is suddenly concerned to straighten out its story on the implied connection between Saddam and 9/11. It may be simply that administration officials were being asked the question by journalists following the second anniversary of the attacks, and they were simply repeating their position for the record. But there was clearly some concern to back away even from the position articulated by Cheney, who appeared to suggest that it was still an open question. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz had, in remarks on this year's 9/11 anniversary, reemphasized the allegation that Saddam "had a great deal to do with terrorism in general and with al Qaeda in particular" although he retracted days later, saying he had "misspoken" and offering a far more limited account of the relationship between Baghdad and bin Laden. It's difficult to avoid the impression of a concerted effort at the top levels of the administration to hone and clarify the message on Iraq's alleged prewar ties to al-Qaeda.

That question will certainly provide much of the focus of the campaign of the latest Democratic Party presidential hopeful, General Wesley Clark, who explicitly accuses President Bush of leading America to war under false pretenses. Clark has challenged both the administration's claims on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction capability, and also what he termed "the suggestion that somehow Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 or in some way connected to it." Last June, Clark alleged to NBC's Meet the Press that there had been a concerted campaign from "people around the White House," starting on September 11, 2001, to connect the attack with Saddam Hussein despite the absence of any evidence to that effect.

Another reason to clear up the administration's stance on Iraq and 9/11 may be the imminent preliminary report of the Iraq Survey Group, whose 1,200 inspectors are currently scouring Iraq for evidence of weapons of mass destruction and links between Saddam's regime and terrorism. Even if the administration now swears it never implied any connection between Iraq and the attacks, the fact that so many Americans believe that association — and therefore, obviously, hold it as a central reason for the U.S. invasion of Iraq — must be worrying. Because as the burden of occupation on ordinary Americans grows heavier, the fact that the postwar reality debunks the myth of a Saddam connection to 9/11 may nonetheless function to diminish enthusiasm for the administration's war effort.

And the al-Qaeda association may be only one problem facing the administration as the truth about Iraq begins to emerge. Expectations of the Survey Group's report, expected in the next two weeks, may have been raised by administration officials who, when facing a clamor over the failure to find weapons of mass destruction early in the summer, called for patience and expressed confidence that the group led by former UNSCOM official David Kay would prove the existence of such weapons. Subsequently, officials began to downshift somewhat, stressing that evidence would be found of programs to build weapons, but not necessarily any actual weapons. But Kay himself may also have contributed to raising expectations during his Capitol Hill report-back in July, when he hinted that doubters were in for surprises when he issued his report.

Kay has, more recently, strongly hinted that his report won't contain smoking gun evidence — the 1,200 member Iraq Survey Group has found no actual prohibited weapons in Iraq, he has told U.S. legislators. Instead, he's expected to offer evidence in support of the argument that whether or not Saddam had actual weapons of mass destruction, he retained the capability and intent to restart his programs once freed of the shackles and scrutiny of the UN sanctions program. One senior U.S. official told the Financial Times, "They won't find weapons but that was never the issue. It's the ability to produce it once he was free of constraints."

General Clark and other challengers may not allow that definition of the "issue" to pass unchallenged, however, since the case for war was based primarily on the idea that Iraq possessed actual weapons of mass destruction, and that it had a relationship with al-Qaeda, which together made Iraq an immediate and intolerable threat to the U.S. and its allies. And former chief UN inspector Hans Blix is firing broadsides, bluntly accusing the U.S. and Britain of spinning the available evidence beyond the realm of plausible conclusions to make the strongest case for war, likening them to Mediaeval witch-hunters who went out and "found" witches once they'd convinced themselves that such creatures actually existed.

This week's corrective statements from the Bush administration may be the prelude to a campaign season dominated, initially at least, by questions over how the U.S. found itself locked into its current Iraq quandary. U.S. commander Lt.-Gen. Ricardo Sanchez announced Thursday that in the past week alone, four of his men were killed and 46 were wounded in combat. That was before three more were killed at Tikrit Thursday, and more were wounded at Khaldiya. And the Bush administration is not currently expecting substantial levels of military or financial support to lighten the U.S. load. Had postwar Iraq at least offered the spectacle of grateful Iraqis cheering the U.S. as their liberators and getting on with rebuilding the country, the question of Iraq's weapons or al-Qaeda links might seem purely academic. But the mounting financial and human cost of the occupation, more than anything else, has allowed President Bush's domestic challengers to make Iraq the centerpiece of their own campaign for regime change.

• Tony Karon
• Corrective statements on Iraq and 9/11 signal coming clashes over the administration's case for war