The switch: The war on Iraq (Say, how's that going?)
The great Seymour Hersh—if only the Times could have reporters like him!—writes in The New Yorker showing the bait and switch in action.
American intelligence and State Department officials have told me that by early 2002 Syria had emerged as one of the C.I.A.’s most effective intelligence allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, providing an outpouring of information that came to an end only with the invasion of Iraq. ...
Flynt Leverett, a former C.I.A. analyst who served until early this year on the National Security Council and is now a fellow at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution, told me that Syria’s help “let us thwart an operation that, if carried out, would have killed a lot of Americans.” ...
Syria’s efforts to help seemed to confound the Bush Administration, which was fixated on Iraq. ...
In Washington, there was anger about what many officials saw as the decision of the Bush Administration to choose confrontation with Syria over day-to-day help against Al Qaeda. In a sense, the issue was not so much Syria itself as a competition between ideology and practicality—and between the drive to go to war in Iraq and the need to fight terrorism—which has created a deep rift in the Bush Administration. The collapse of the liaison relationship has left many C.I.A. operatives especially frustrated. “The guys are unbelievably pissed that we’re blowing this away,” a former high-level intelligence official told me. “... The Syrians were a lot more willing to help us, but they”—Rumsfeld and his colleagues—“want to go in there next.''
So, Bush used the war on terror—the bait—to market the war on Iraq—the switch.
Then, having gotten the Iraq war they always wanted—with a weak bad guy who hadn't attacked America—our fruitcake administration blew it with AQ—really bad guys who did attack America and killed 3000 of us. On to Syria!
Bait... And switch. Republican Tactics 101. With the lives of soldiers and civlians at stake.