The Era of Declining Expectations

A little context. Before the war on Iraq, one of the reasons advanced for the invasion was that Saddam Hussein was an ally of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups and might hand over some of his Weapons of Mass Destruction to them. This was not taken as seriously as other charges (mainly that Saddam was dangerously unstable and that he had access to Weapons of Mass Destruction which he might use on the United States).

We now move to the present day. The Weapons of Mass Destruction argument has largely fallen apart. It's not off the charts, but the only person who believes that Saddam had large stocks of WMDs that threatened the US is Ann Coulter. Now we are supposed to content ourselves with the idea that instead of having Weapons of Mass Destruction, Saddam Hussein had Weapons of Mass Destruction programs.

So in light of that, pro-Bush commentators and administration officials are trying to find a new rationale for the war, and they've apparently found one in the theory that Iraq and al-Qaeda were collaborating. This revived tack, however, has a few built-in expectation diminishers.

I was listening to Fox News this morning on the way in to work (the local radio station plays the audio feed from Fox and Friends). As I drove along I listened to Stephen Hayes who has apparently wrote a book on the connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

Here's the game. Claim that future President John Kerry and other Democrats claimed that there was no link (of any kind) between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. In so far as any Democrats said that it would have been a foolish statement. So now that you've got your strawman up, all you have to do is find links between Saddam Hussein and terrorist organizations. Simple.

But of course a more important question is were the links that Saddam Hussein had with al-Qaeda a direct threat to the United States (such that we had to invade by the spring of last year or else we would have been sunk)?

A second question, if these vague relationship links are enough to wipe out Saddam, what do we make of the links that al-Qaeda has with a half dozen other nations (including Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, two allies)?

The trouble is that the Bush administration needs desperately to make the decision to invade Iraq unimpeachable. And that's not proving to be as easy as they'd like it to be.