Let me return one more time, at least for today, to this issue of who’s al Qaeda and who’s not. Obviously, at one level it is simply a semantic question. And it can seem like a lot of ink to spill on a point of words and definitions when so much carnage and controversy are unfolding before our eyes. So it is worth stepping back to see just what the big deal is and how it plays into our predicament in Iraq and how we might get our way out.
Beginning in the months just after 9/11 and ever since the president and his deputies have tried to float their foreign policy on the shock, fear and desire for revenge spawned by the 9/11 attacks. The first signs (though these weren’t clear in their details at the time) came in the decision to pull troops away from the hunt for bin Laden himself in late 2001 in order to ready them for the assault on Iraq little more than a year later. There we have the kernel of deception which is like the original sin of the Iraq War and, because of that, keeps coming resurfacing again and again. The claim that attacking Iraq was attacking the people who attacked the United States on 9/11, that the two things were related in anything more than a mental figment.
So at the outset it was that Iraq and al Qaeda are connected and either did attack us together (as Dick Cheney frequently suggested) or could in the future (as everyone else did). Then the beginnings of the insurgency were not a problem because we were drawing al Qaeda into Iraq to fight them on our own terms. Then we couldn’t leave Iraq because doing so would hand it over to al Qaeda.
As the cycle progressed there was an mounting tendency for the administration to argue that we could not abandon its policies precisely because of the scope of the failure of those policies up to the present point — a veritable perpetual motion machine of incompetence and disaster. But setting that aside, the enduring pattern has been for the White House to ask us to make our decisions about Iraq not based on what is happening in Iraq but on what happened in New York and Washington on 9/11.
Don’t look at Iraq to make this decision, look at the Twin Towers. That’s been the administration strategy for over five years. So when we see the scam popping up in a slightly different guise, even if it requires getting deep into the weeds and raising an alarm over key points of word choice and emphasis, then we simply must do so. Because this is the original sin, the founding deceit upon which everything has been built and from which the entire catastrophe unfolded.
