IT’S HARD to get worked up over a Maureen Dowd column anymore. In fact, I usually skip not only her rants, but also the columns about Maureen Dowd columns. However her latest, about the new Osama bin Laden audiotape and the much-discussed al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection, deserves comment.
After opening with a how-weird-is-that proposition–bin Laden coming “to the rescue” of George W. Bush–followed by a series of points she assumes to be damning, Dowd gets serious: “The Bushies have been hellbent on making the 9/11 connection.”
That sentence is either deeply misleading or factually incorrect, since the administration has been extremely careful not to claim any Iraq links to the September 11 attacks. If Dowd can back up her assertion with evidence or a quote, she should do so. If she can’t, she should retract it and publish a correction.
What the administration has done is demonstrate contacts between Saddam Hussein’s government and al Qaeda. Their case has been precise, and at times, detailed. That seems to bother Dowd, but she’s unable to refute it. So instead, she offers reasons that she finds such a link implausible and challenges a claim the administration isn’t making. And then, in a stunning bit of tautology, Dowd criticizes the administration for releasing the new Osama tape. The columnist who obsessively criticizes the Bush administration’s penchant for secrecy, takes the White House to task for revealing too much about the al Qaeda-Iraq connection (which she insists doesn’t exist).
But what’s her reasoning? Why, for example, if Bush knows that Abu Wa’el is a top al Qaeda operative who also works for Saddam’s Mukhabarat, should he not say that? If the United States knows from numerous defectors that Saddam trained “non-Iraqi Arabs” in hijacking techniques at Salman Pak, why keep it quiet? If Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an al Qaeda chem/bio expert, left Afghanistan and ended up in Baghdad, why not disclose it? If Al-Zarqawi received medical treatment in Baghdad and stayed there for two months while he recovered, why deny it? And if the administration knows that more than twenty al Qaeda members have established operations in Baghdad since last summer, why not broadcast that fact to the world?
Dowd never tells us. Instead, she dismisses this as “huffing and puffing” and says that CIA Director George Tenet hyped the connection in Senate testimony this week to make the case for war. Tenet’s skepticism about any Iraq-al Qaeda link is well-known. For months after credible reports (plural) of cooperation between Saddam’s Mukhabarat and an al Qaeda cell known as Ansar al-Islam, the CIA essentially sat on its collective hands. When teams of U.S. intelligence officials, including some from the CIA, finally undertook a serious investigation of those claims, many returned convinced of the alleged ties. What’s interesting, then, isn’t Tenet’s supposed exaggeration of this link, but his eagerness to mention it at all. To say nothing of his willingness to sit behind Colin Powell last week as Powell laid out those connections for the world to see.
Contrary to Dowd’s claims, the Bush administration has been consistently reluctant–perhaps too reluctant–to use Iraq-al Qaeda connections in its case for war. As this magazine reported last July, “the links with al Qaeda will not likely be a central part of the coming ‘public case’ against Saddam.” The focus has been, and remains, on weapons of mass destruction. At the U.N. last week, Colin Powell spent sixty minutes on Iraq’s WMD possession and concealment, and just fifteen on Iraq-al Qaeda links. And even including that detailed 15-minute section came as a last-minute decision.
So when Dowd alleges that “The Bushies have been hellbent on making the 9/11 connection” with Saddam, does she know something we don’t? Or is she just throwing a tantrum?
Stephen F. Hayes is staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
