Bush Still Trying to Tie 9/11 to Iraq
Posted by gopinder on December 19, 2008
Why has public support for the war in Iraq waned? According to Dubya, it must be the American people’s fault. That’s right, the same people he’s claiming to protect! They just don’t see the same connection between 9/11 and Iraq that he sees. Why don’t you educate us, o wise one?
President Bush lamented this week that the farther the nation gets from the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the harder it is “for people to see the connection between Al Qaeda in Iraq and their own security.”
“One of the real difficulties of the presidency has been to keep in people’s mind the notion that we are in a war,” Bush said in an interview with RealClearPolitics released Friday. “The farther we got away from September the 11th … the harder it was for people to see the connection between Al Qaeda in Iraq and their own security.”
So let me get this straight – we need to be vigilant about Al Qaeda in Iraq so that we can prevent another 9/11-like lapse in national security? But wasn’t Al Qaeda in Iraq nonexistent before we invaded that country? What it boils down to is that we’re fighting in a war to protect ourselves from…ourselves? How’s that for a national security strategy in a post-9/11 world?
It’s lamentable that after being regarded as possibly the most unpopular president in American history, this president still won’t own up to the biggest foreign policy failure of our time – to invade and occupy a country whose existence mattered naught to our national security. What’s worse is that he’s STILL trying to forge a relationship between Iraq and 9/11, when only two weeks ago he was denying that any such link exists. And in 2003 he stated, “We’ve had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the September 11th.” The 9/11 commission investigating the attack also definitively established that no link between the Iraqi government and the events of 9/11 exists. It’s no longer a matter of opinion or PR spin; it’s an agreed upon fact. What we’re seeing here is a desperate attempt on the part of Bush to grab onto anything that may help create a positive legacy for himself, but to his chagrin, in the words of another former president, facts sure are stubborn things.
