Following up on Bill Kristol’s post here, it is simply not the case that the Bush administration “promoted” the “idea that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein helped al-Qaeda plan the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,” as the Post puts it on the front page. Here is David Sanger, in the New York Times, on September 18, 2003. “The White House has never said Mr. Hussein was part of the Sept. 11 plot, though from the moment of the attacks there was a search to determine whether he was linked. As Mr. Bush has described the Iraq conflict as part of the war on terror, he has drawn a loose connection, saying that after Sept. 11, 2001, the United States could no longer tolerate the kind of threat Mr. Hussein posed or risk that Mr. Hussein’s weapons could reach the hands of terrorists.” Sanger’s article came as Bush amended a comment Dick Cheney made on “Meet the Press” one day earlier. Cheney had said “we don’t know” whether Iraq had any role in the 9/11 attacks — a claim that hardly amounts to promoting such a notion. Bush said that he had not seen evidence of an Iraqi hand in those attacks. The story notes that the claim of Iraqi involvement “has since been rejected even by the president himself.” The sentence is imprecise — since when? — but is consistent with a common left-wing myth that George W. Bush used an Iraq-9/11 connection to argue for the war only to disavow it afterwards. It’s nonsense. On January 31, 2003, nearly two months before the war, reporters from Newsweek asked Bush directly if Iraq was behind 9/11 and he said, directly: “I cannot make that claim.” The basic facts about Iraq and terrorism have been distorted and ignored by the mainstream media for years. When captured Iraqi documents demonstrated that Iraq had provided support to Ayman al Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden’s chief deputy, most of the news media thought that such a discovery wasn’t newsworthy.
