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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (27777)	2/3/2004 10:32:24 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 793625

but to point that is part of the case that the Republicans were being duplicitous: Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11, but they were slyly shading that truth, using the power of associative thinking that they and Madison are true experts at to make the connection between them. They were so effective that a majority of Americans still believe that Saddam had at least something to do with 9/11 even after Bush has said (sort of "whispered" it--it has served its purpose) publicly (finally) that he didn't. Yes, they were putting it together, but not the way that Madison Avenue puts together ownership of a new car and the blonde caressing it; they put it together because it WAS together in their own minds, whether Saddam had anything to do with it or not, which is still unproven. (I say "unproven", not false, because there were Iraqi fingerprints on the 1993 attack, and many, many people believe that OBL had to have the help of an intelligence service to pull off 9/11) What created Al Qaeda? what were its chief grievances? Ans: our troops on Saudi soil. And why did we have troops in Saudi Arabia, at all? To contain Saddam. Why were were we fighting a low-grade war in the no-fly zones? Why did we support keeping the sanctions on Saddam, enabling Saddam to put on his daily dead baby parade? To contain Saddam. That was why OBL declared war on us 1998, and our pathetically weak responses to the embassy bombings, the Cole, etc, only helped convince him that we were soft & decadent and didn't have the stomach for a real fight. Afghanistan was a start, but that is far away from the Arabs. So that is why the pro-war camp thought it was time to go hit something hard in the Arab lands (what Friedman calls "the real reason" for the war), and there was no more deserving target than Saddam. Besides, the other choice wasn't 'do nothing, let everything stay as it was'; the other choice was 'do nothing, watch sanctions dissolve and Saddam emerge triumphant.' And that was a terrible choice for the US.