There they go again.
The Bush administration has updated its attempts to conflate the old Iraqi Saddam Hussein regime and the al Qaeda radical Islamist movement, but it still does not hold water.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice made the Sunday morning talk show rounds, generating headlines for her comments that some U.S. troops might be withdrawn from Iraq before the end of the Bush presidency.
But less-noted was her new variation on the Iraq-al Qaeda pre-9/11 connection on Meet the Press:
Saddam was not related to the events of September 11th. But if you really believe that the only thing that happened on September 11th was people flew airplanes into buildings, I think you have a very narrow view of what we faced on September 11th. We faced the outcome of an ideology of hatred throughout the Middle East that had to be dealt with. Saddam Hussein was a part of that old Middle East.
A slightly new wrinkle, but with the same old problems.
Administration officials have long sought to connect Iraq and 9/11, originally dancing just short of openly saying that Iraq was behind the terror attacks and more recently pulling strongly back from that declaration as the weight of evidence built up against it.
Recall Vice President Cheney's assertion in late 2001 that a meeting between Mohamed Atta and a top Iraqi intelligence official had been "pretty well confirmed," (It hadn't been, mostly because the meeting likely never took place). The 9/11 Commission has since pretty well confirmed what most Middle East experts had been telling anyone interested: That Iraq and al Qaeda never had an operational relationship, despite what Cheney, Bush and company have repeatedly said.
The problem with the Iraq-al Qaeda assertion is that bin Laden hated the Hussein government. Recall that the stated source of his rage against the West was that the Saudi government chose the infidel U.S. military as its prime defense against Hussein instead of bin Laden's mujahadeen. If the U.S. was the great Satan for bin Laden, Hussein's secular Arab government was at least a pretty good Satan.
Which brings us to Rice's Sunday remarks.
It's true that 9/11 was the result of an ideology of hatred (nice phrase), but that hatred was directed not only at the west, but also at secular Arab governments. Like Iraq's. To suggest that Hussein and bin Laden shared that ideology is either disingenuous or uninformed.