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On Friday, as part of the same "truth" offensive, Vice President Dick Cheney recalled the efforts during the 1990s to stymie Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, such as United Nations inspections and targeted airstrikes.
"All of these measures failed," Cheney said.
No, actually, all those measures succeeded, which is why we haven't found anything resembling a weapon of mass destruction in Iraq.
Others, too, are part of this Orwellian tactic, although they sometimes bobble their assignment. Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas) had just returned home from a government-sponsored tour of Iraq when she appeared on Fox News to comment on Sunday's car bombing in Baghdad. Proving she's a good listener, she insisted that the suicide attack was actually good news. How's that? Speaking of the American nation-building effort, she explained, "As it's working, there are more incidents like this, from people who don't want it to work." By that inverted logic, of course, it would be bad news if there were fewer bombings.
But then, undercutting Granger's case, the interviewer noted that Granger and her fellow visitors had not actually stayed overnight in Iraq while they were visiting the country; each night, they were flown back to Kuwait, some 400 miles south of Baghdad. One might think for a moment about the implications of such a long-distance commute. If all the American security in Iraq can't make Iraq secure for VIPs, then maybe Iraq isn't so secure.
And there's this:
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In a television interview last month, Cheney discussed a link between Saddam Hussein and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as though it were a live possibility, not something that had long ago been determined to lack credibility. That prompted an unusual rebuttal from Bush, who declared that there was no evidence of a link between Hussein and Sept. 11.
The fact that the correction came from Bush, not Cheney, raised questions no one wanted to answer. After all, the government has a monopoly on overseas intelligence, and the public rightly assumes that reports of threats to the United States represent the best possible assessments by teams of professionals. Is Cheney refusing to accept the president's judgment? Does Cheney know something Bush doesn't? And who's really in charge here?
Then, on Friday, Cheney again repeated an assertion that others in the administration have steered away from. Hussein, Cheney told the Heritage Foundation, "had an established relationship with Al Qaeda, providing training to Al Qaeda members in . . . poisons, gases, and making conventional bombs."
The question of whether Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda remains of importance to those here and particularly overseas deciding whether to support the unfinished war. In stating it so baldly, as a fact, Cheney is committing the government's credibility to his assertion.
But what's the evidence for it? Cheney offered none. If he knows something others don't, he should put it on the table. The only time the administration was asked to provide evidence, in Secretary of State Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations, the link between Hussein and Al Qaeda seemed far less certain.