OxBlog

Saturday, June 19, 2004

# Posted 2:56 AM by Ariel David Adesnik  

ARE BUSH'S CRITICS IRRESPONSIBLE? According to NRO, they're just plain wrong. Andrew McCarthy says that if you take a close look at what the 9/11 Commission says about the Saddam-Al Qaeda connection it's far from definitive.

I don't buy it. While I'll be the first to admit that there's a helluva lot we don't know about both Saddam and Al Qaeda, I'm not sure that there's much more evidence out there to find right now. If the Bush administration has invested so much time and effort in investigating the relationship between Saddam and Osama, why hasn't it found evidence of a connection? And if it found such evidence, why doesn't the 9/11 Commission believe that Public Enemies #1 and #2 had a "collaborative relationship"?

But what about the actual criticism directed toward the administration? With regard to the "Bush lied" chorus, the WaPo says that
The accusation is nearly as irresponsible as the Bush administration's rhetoric has been.
That's pushing it. The NYT may be ineffably pretentious when it writes that "Now President Bush should apologize to the American people" -- as if the absence of a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection was news -- but irresponsible and disingenuous rhetoric from the White House is far more dangerous than pretentiousness in the paper of record.

It is worth pointing out, however, that the NYT editorial board can be just as careless with its language as Messrs. Bush and Cheney. For example, it writes that
The Bush administration convinced a substantial majority of Americans before the war that Saddam Hussein was somehow linked to 9/11.
That is misleading at best or simply not true. While the Bush administration hardly sought to resolve public confusion about this point, the President never asserted that Saddam played a role in 9/11. Over at CBS, John Roberts isn't much better. He reported that
It is one of President Bush's last surviving justifications for war in Iraq, and today, it took a devastating hit when the 9-11 Commission declared there was no collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden. ... Those repeated associations left the majority of Americans believing Saddam was involved in 9/11.
While Roberts' accusation is less explicit than the NYT's, his comments are supposed to be straight news, not an editorial. Meanwhile, Dick Cheney is launching a pretty fierce counter-attack against the NYT. While I agree with Andrew that Cheney is right about the NYT headline being pretty unfair, Cheney's case seems to revolve primarily around the existence of a Saddam-Zarqawi relationship. If that's all the Vice President has to go on, he's not in good shape.
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