Exhaustive review sponsored by the Pentagon finds NO link between Saddam, al Qaida
Glad you're here to keep me straight. :9: But that article does not support your contention. There was a long history of ties between the two, as was detailed in the 9-11 report. But no operational link, no 9-11 link. No one in the administration made that allegation. You keep wanting to inspect the individual parts of the puzzle(in hindsight) when decision makers at the time were looking at the puzzle as a whole, in the wake of a colossal intelligence failure which lead to 9-11. They did not want to be caught with their pants down, again. Now, in my book, once a decision to go to war is made, I expect my leaders to whip up support. There is a difference between that and deliberately lying. Since the war began, there has been precious little "whipping up," which has lead to some of the erosion of support for the war.
I'm not sure where you are getting this from. The 9-11 commision specifically debunked any collaboration between Saddam and Al Queda:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A47812-2004Jun16.html
Indeterminate "links" are not the same as collaboration against the United States. We have "links" with very shady charachters all over the globe. That's how we keep tabs on them. If you apply the same rules to us, then we are supporting whatever it is they do, correct?
You are guilty of exactly the same thing you are accusing Reb of. You only want to examine your puzzle pieces individually also, and you are forcing them together into a picture they do not make, just as the adminsitration did, and leaving out pieces you do not like too.
You know this adminsitration was set to go after Iraq even prior to 9/11 and you know that it was on the agenda for many of Bush's supporters since the 1990s. Saddam was no more a threat on 9/12 than he was on 9/11 yet they chose to take advantage of a tragedy to create another one.
Even Clinton toyed with the idea of stirring up a confrontation with Saddam under pressure from the neoconservatives. Smartly, he backed away from it because he probably quickly determined it would be a fiasco.
According to book by reporter Dana Priest, “The Mission”, the Bill Clinton White House wanted then CENTCOM commander Gen. Anthony Zinni to order his pilots to provoke a confrontation with Iraq in the no-fly zone by seeking to deliberately draw fire from the Iraqi military.
http://www.amazon.com/Mission-Waging-Keeping-Americas-Military/dp/0393010244
The request for the provocation was conveyed to General Zinni by the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Ralston. But Zinni, who rightly believed that it could lead to an unwanted conflict, insisted that a formal request from the White House would have to be sent before he would give the order -- everything on the record. Clinton would not go on the record and the plan was dropped.