This time with the Al Qaeda Iraq link. There's no evidence of it, and there was always little logic to it, write Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon in today's Times:
In making its case for war, the administration dismissed the arguments of experts who noted that despite some contacts between Baghdad and Osama bin Laden's followers over the years, there was no strong evidence of a substantive relationship. As members of the National Security Council staff from 1994 to 1999, we closely examined nearly a decade's worth of intelligence and we became convinced, like many of our colleagues in the intelligence community, that the religious radicals of Al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another or share sufficiently compelling interests to work together.
But Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promised that the Bush administration had "bulletproof evidence" of a Qaeda-Iraq link, and Secretary of State Colin Powell made a similar case to the United Nations. Such claims now look as questionable as the allegation that Iraq was buying uranium in Niger.
This is not only a question of political accountability — it also bears on our nation's fundamental approach to security. United States policy changed dramatically when the Bush administration, lacking compelling evidence of an Iraq-Qaeda link, decided to base the Qaeda part of its pro-war argument on a hypothetical situation.
But this scenario is extremely unlikely. For years now the world's leading state sponsors of terrorism have had no confidence that they could carry out attacks against the United States undetected. That is why this brand of terrorism has been on the wane.
American policy must recognize this clear division between the old state-sponsored terrorism, which we have shown we can deter, and the new, religiously motivated attacks.
[T]he Bush administration should focus more on Al Qaeda, the only terrorist group that poses an imminent, undeterrable danger. New instability in Afghanistan and the continued spread of jihadist ideology in the Islamic world mean that the prospects for another 9/11 are growing.
It's bad that Bush lied (even though by this time we expect it). What's worse is that he took his eye of the ball with AQ. What's even worse than that is that he is creating the conditions for AQ, and other transnational, decentralized, jihadist organizations like it, to flourish.
Remind me again why the Republicans are so good on national security?