A rchive Date
[ 22-09-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/editorial/outlook/2110248
Americans don't take kindly to being fooled
By CLARENCE PAGE
Sept. 19, 2003, 9:11PM
One of my favorite mayors of all time, the late great Harold Washington of Chicago, used to talk about politicians who "throw the rock, then hide their hand."
That image vividly came to mind last week as President Bush admitted, with all the wide-eyed innocence of a kid caught with his hand in a cookie jar and with crumbs on his lips ("What? Who? Me...?"), that, "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with Sept. 11."
Yet, a poll conducted by The Washington Post last month found that 69 percent of Americans believe Hussein probably was personally involved anyway.
So where do people get this zany idea that Saddam and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks were connected?
Do seven out of 10 Americans think all Arabs and Muslims look alike?
Are Americans too geopolitically illiterate to know Iraq from a hard place?
Or, ah-ha, have our leaders misled us?
The White House has never definitively declared a link between Iraq and Sept. 11. Yet, Team Bush has chosen its words in ways that expertly avoid declaring such a link even as they strongly suggest one anyway.
"We know Iraq and the al-Qaida terrorist network share a common enemy: The United States of America," Bush said in his televised address in which he made his case for an invasion of Iraq last October.
"The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept. 11, 2001 -- and still goes on," he said from the deck of an aircraft carrier on May 1, in a speech in which he declared an end to major combat in Iraq.
"With those attacks" on Sept. 11, Bush said, "the terrorists and their supporters declared war on the United States. And war is what they got."
"We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases," the president said in his Oct. 7 speech in Cincinnati. "And we know that after Sept. 11, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America."
Vice President Cheney didn't let up last Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press, when he said, "If we're successful in Iraq ... then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."
"Nine-eleven?" Wrong, Bush confirmed three days later.
Still, while discarding the Saddam-Sept. 11 link, the president clung to his belief that Hussein was linked to al-Qaida, even though the evidence to support that has been shaky when it has not been completely discredited.
But, some still will say, so what? The United States deposed an "evil dictator," as Bush promised. True enough. But deposing an evil dictator was not the reason why most Americans thought they were going to war.
Most apparently thought they were striking at the core of what Bush was portraying as the terrorist networks behind 9/11. In fact, we were bombing the outskirts at best, while the central battle to find bin Laden and break up al-Qaida was going on miles away in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Judging by the polls -- and some of the mail I have received -- most Americans sent our troops to war with the belief that the fighting was connected to Sept. 11. Those of us who were paying close attention might have made the transition from Osama and Afghanistan to Iraq and Saddam but most of the public did not make it with us.
And Team Bush, whipping up their anti-Saddam frenzy, did what they could to blur the distinctions.
Fewer people would care now were it not for the way the war's other underpinnings have fallen like dominoes. The Iraq Survey Group, with 1,500 experts, has been busily looking for weapons of mass destruction for five months, without finding any. The results have convinced Hans Blix, chief U.N. weapons inspector, that Iraq destroyed all its unconventional weapons a decade ago -- but wouldn't admit it.
Right. That would be sort of like putting up a "Danger: Vicious Dog" sign to scare away burglars when you don't really have a dog. It appears that Bush did not have as much of a dog in Iraq as he wanted us to believe, either.
Meanwhile, American troop casualties mount and polls show most of the public opposes spending the additional $87 billion Bush has requested for Iraq and Afghanistan. They'd rather spend it at home.
Maybe a simple apology to the American people would help the president's case. People forgive honest mistakes. They don't like to be fooled.
Page is a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist specializing in urban issues. He is based in Washington, D.C. cpage@tribune.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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