Richard Cohen disturbs me

Via Wonkette, this line from Richard Cohen's latest column is really unnecessary:

It would be nice, fitting and pretty close to sexually exciting if Bush somehow acknowledged his mistakes and said he had learned from them.

And who cares if he admits he admits some mistakes and claims to have learned from them? Talk is cheap.

Comments

[Jon Henke]

And so, apparently, is sexual titillation in the Cohen household.

[Jonny]

Cohen also disturbs me. He said, in reference to Bush's remarks, "For example, the insistence that Hussein was somehow linked to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001—a leitmotif of Bush administration geopolitical fantasy—tells you much more than whether this or that fact was right. It tells you that to Bush and his people, the facts did not matter."

However, this is what Bush did say. "There's no question that Saddam Hussein had al Qaeda ties." But he also said, "We have no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with the Sept. 11 attacks."

Where's this "insistance" Cohen is talking about?

So here we are 2 years later, with the Bush quote above having been proven to be correct (about the links but not the tie), and we have Richard Cohen telling us that Bush and his administration are living in a fantasy?

No irony there, huh?

[Anodyne]

Jonny,

I agree that the use of the words …”the insistence that Hussein was somehow linked to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001…” by Cohen in the quote you provided doesn't do justice to the actual subtlety with which the administration handled the purported link between Saddam and 9/11.

Could you tell me if you are comfortable with the fact that the President waited until September of 2003 to make the declarative statement you quoted that there was no evidence of a link between Saddam and 9/11?

Also, when asked during a CNBC interview in June of 2004 “Was Iraq involved with al Qaeda in the attack on 9/11?” Dick Cheney answered, “We don’t know.” Do you think that answer was reasonably consistent with the President's 2003 statement?

[Jonny]

"There is no evidence..."

"We don't know."

Where's the hang-up Anondyne?

It was never about Saddam being complicit in the 9/11 attacks. Here's what we "knew" or thought we knew:

Terrorists attacked us. Saddam has links to terrorists. Saddam hates America. Saddam has WMDs. Saddam could give WMDs to terrorists. 22 other reasons Saddam needs to be forcibly removed from power other than WMDs, which a vast majority of Senators signed.

[Anodyne]

Jonny,

You've said quite a lot, but you didn't answer my questions directly. Is it safe to assume from your comments that you are comfortable with the president waiting to make this declaration until September of 2003?

Can I also assume that "where's the hang up...?" means you don't see any inconsistency in the statement by Bush in 2003 and Cheney in 2004?

[Jonny]

Is it safe to assume from your comments that you are comfortable with the president waiting to make this declaration until September of 2003?

Yes. Bush never said Saddam was involved in 9/11.

Can I also assume that "where's the hang up...?" means you don't see any inconsistency in the statement by Bush in 2003 and Cheney in 2004?

Correct. We have no evidence that a woman shot JFK. We also don't know whether a woman killed JFK. No evidence of involvement does NOT mean that is NOT possible the involvement never occurred.

[Anodyne]

Jonny,

Thank you for the answer to my first question. I thought perhaps you were going to elaborate on why you were comfortable with Bush delaying his declaration, but we can leave that for another day.

Although we both agree that Bush never said Saddam was involved in 9/11, I guess it does bear repeating. Personally, I’ve always found the delay in explicitly stating that there was no evidence of a connection rather puzzling. The week after 9/11 only 3% of Americans thought Saddam was involved. By February of 2003, 45% thought he might have been involved and newspaper stories were regularly reporting that the administration had drawn the link either directly or by innuendo. Oddly enough, the administration didn’t defend itself from these accusations. By September of 2003, when Bush made the declaration you cited in your first comment, 69% of Americans believed that Saddam might have been involved in the attacks of 9/11. Who can say how Americans came to believe this, but I suppose it’s just another example of the fog of war, and the President will just have to deal today with the consequences of choosing not to set the record straight before the war.

In hindsight, if the war had gone better, it’s likely the question of a link between Saddam and 9/11 would have become one merely of academic interest. But given the chance that things might not go as planned, it makes me wonder why the administration didn’t head off public misperceptions when they had the opportunity. But that’s all in hindsight now and other than a forecast by an obscure former ambassador quoted in this pre-war http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0314/p02s01-woiq.html”>Christian Science Monitor story, I suppose not many people could have seen this misunderstanding coming.

Although you didn’t answer my second question about whether Cheney’s 2004 statement was consistent with Bush’s 2003 declaration, I nevertheless got a chuckle out of the argumentum ad ignorantiam you offered on the separate question of whether it is possible that Saddam was involved in the attacks of 9/11. It was very amusing, even if a tad condescending.