Old news: linking Saddam and 9/11

In a speech on October 8, 2002--the one where he reported (falsely, it turns out) that Saddam Hussein had a fleet of unmanned aircraft that could be used to disperse chemical and biological agents and that Iraq had ballistic missiles that could travel hundreds of miles--George W. Bush mentioned September 11 five times. This speech is a good place to start in untangling how the administration was successful in conflating Saddam and September 11, even though no link between the two exists. While he never directly connects the two, his rhetoric slyly juxtaposes them. Any half-listening American couldn't help but morph the tragedy of 9/11 with the tyranny of an Iraqi dictator when the president reports that Hussein killed or injured 20,000 of his own people, "more than six times the number of people who died in the attacks of September 11." In other cases, he simply invokes 9/11--having seen such terror, we must protect ourselves--leveraging the fear of terrorism in service of his pet project in Iraq.

New York's Republican governor George Pataki wasn't so sly. At an April 11 rally at Ground Zero, he told a crowd of some 25,000: "Some of you may have seen yesterday in Baghdad a picture of a statue of that evil dictator being toppled and dragged through the streets by Iraqis. Let's melt it down. Let's bring it to New York and let's put it in one of the girders that's going to rise over here as a symbol of the rebuilding of New York and the rebuilding of America." Paraphrasing Amy Goodman's comment in Madison last week, this would be the first factual link between September 11 and Saddam Hussein.