Iraq and 9/11
Posted by: Jon Henke
The QandO Blog
Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Well, great. This is just what we need.
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A Republican congressman from North Carolina told CNN on Wednesday that the "evidence is clear" that Iraq was involved in the terrorist attacks against the United States on September 11, 2001.
"Saddam Hussein and people like him were very much involved in 9/11," Rep. Robin Hayes said.
Told no investigation had ever found evidence to link Saddam and 9/11, Hayes responded, "I'm sorry, but you must have looked in the wrong places." Hayes, the vice chairman of the House subcommittee on terrorism, said legislators have access to evidence others do not.
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Of course, this flies in the face of the 9/11 Commission Report, which concluded that we've seen no "evidence indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or carrying out any attacks against the United States", and President Bush, who said that we have "no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11 [attacks]."
For a follow-up, maybe the Congressman from North Carolina will give us a little insight into those WMD stockpiles in Iraq. [sigh]
It's disturbing enough to have such ignoramuses in Congress—and, with Curt Weldon peddling letters from an already-discredited fabulist, he's not the only one—but this is worse. Congressman Hayes comments distract from the very important point that needs to be made and remade about the connection between Iraq and the (inaptly named) War on Terror, the point made by James Joyner here..
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President Bush's attempt to link the two is merely part of the campaign to persuade Americans that the war in Iraq is tied to the fight against global terrorism. Constant reminders of the 9/11 attacks are necessary to remind people of why we're engaged in that fight.
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More specifically, we are engaged in a war against a sociopolitical paradigm—the confluence of Fundamentalist Islamist Jihadism and the powerful tyrannies that amplify the danger they present—which obtains predominantly in the Middle East, and can only be minimized to a relatively safe level by altering the fundamental nature of the States in the Middle East in order to disable the incentives that make Islamist terrorism seem worthwhile.
That is, to "win" the so-called War on Terror, we have to change the political landscape in the Middle East and minimize the dangers presented by the nexus of terrorism and Rogue States.
We might disagree on the utility of attacking Iraq for that reason, but that is the connection between the Iraq war and 9/11. It's not particularly hard to understand.
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