Bush, Saddam, and the 9/11 Connection

Whenever someone who is not a conservative has found out that I lean to right I am always put in a position to defend Bush. I'm not a huge fan of Bush, I see his handling of the war (the first four years), the runaway spending, his handling of illegal immigration, and his disastrous appointments to important posts as disappointing. It's frustrating to defend someone you have problems yourself with.

The handling of the war is really what frustrates me the most. I was ambivalent about my support for the war when it began, later I thought it was the right decision handled completely the wrong way. In past wars when things weren't working the President would fire those that were ineffective, Bush just refused to severe ties with people who he saw as loyal.

David Frum writes:

The indifference to quality of personnel - always a problem - has now become the defining characteristic of the administration. The president continues to imagine he is pursuing one set of policies. But because he allows retiring principals to be succeeded by their deputies, and then those deputies to be followed by their deputies, he has passively acquiesced in allowing his administration to be staffed by people who regard his policies as at best impossible, at worst actively wrong. And then he is surprised when his administration does the opposite of what he wished! Of course it does! If you won't steer the car, it won't go where you want!

Where did things go wrong?

My own personal belief is that the first and most decisive error was the choice of Condoleezza Rice as National Security Adviser. The president chose two powerful national figures as Secretaries of Defense and State....Whoever the president chose, however, it was inevitable that State & Defense would clash. They always do. He needed a strong figure at NSC to broker those clashes. Instead, he chose the weakest NSC adviser in that institution's history. The result: a total breakdown of policy coordination. Millions of words have been written about the bad planning of the Iraq war. To my mind, though, the real puzzle is the failure of the president to act to correct those errors after they were exposed. It was apparent as early as the summer of 2003 that the war had gone wrong. Yet not until the summer of 2007 did the administration act in a serious way to change course. Rumsfeld wouldn't rethink - and Rice was too timid and ineffective to force him.

Frum's column is partly a response to Bill Kristol's article on how badly the administration has handled the PR of the report that links Saddam Hussein and Al Queda.

Relying on a leak of the executive summary, ABC News reported that the study was "the first official acknowledgment from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda." There followed a brief item in the Washington Post that ran under the headline "Study Discounts Hussein, Al-Qaeda Link." The New York Times announced: "Study Finds No Qaeda-Hussein Tie." NPR agreed: "Study Finds No Link Between Saddam, bin Laden."

And the Bush administration reacted with an apparently guilty silence.

But here's the truth. The executive summary of the report is extraordinarily misleading. The full report, released Thursday night, states, for example, on page 42: "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." In fact, as Stephen F. Hayes reports in this issue, the study outlines a startling range of connections between Saddam and various organizations associated with al Qaeda and other terror groups.....
The rise of Islamist fundamentalism in the region gave Saddam the opportunity to make terrorism, one of the few tools remaining in Saddam's "coercion" toolbox, not only cost effective but a formal instrument of state power. Saddam nurtured this capability with an infrastructure supporting (1) his own particular brand of state terrorism against internal and external threats, (2) the state sponsorship of suicide operations, and (3) organizational relationships and "outreach programs" for terrorist groups. Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces.

It's now the accepted wisdom that Suddam had nothing to do with Al Queda, all the news outlets that blared the headline of the "no connection" dominate popular opinion. So now if I bring up the facts of the study with people who oppose the war, they will laugh in my face and, as the lefties love to say, - it will be all Bush's fault.