Bush has misled Americans on Iraq
Financial Times; Jun 18, 2004

The congressional commission investigating the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US has concluded that there is no evidence to support the Bush administration's thesis that Saddam Hussein helped Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda organisation carry them out. This conclusion, emerging from a strong tradition of congressional oversight, could be taken further.

The evidence the administration produced to demonstrate the link was, at best, spurious, at worst, fabricated. This is not a small matter, especially in the context of the Bush team's case for its war of choice against Iraq.

The first public justification for the war was that the Iraqi dictator possessed weapons of mass destruction with which he could dominate his neighbours and threaten the west. This was always an exaggeration. There was some reason to believe he had residual chemical and biological weapons, but none whatsoever to suggest he had reconstituted a nuclear arms programme. As we now know, no WMD of any description have been found; not one US assertion to the United Nations Security Council by Colin Powell, secretary of state, in February last year, has been substantiated.

The second public justification - which was wheeled on stage to distract the audience from the embarrassing absence of WMD - was that the war was about freeing Iraqis and, indeed, the Middle East from tyranny. After Falluja and Abu Ghraib, however, 92 per cent of Iraqis regard US troops as occupiers, while 2 per cent see them as liberators, according to a Coalition Provisional Authority poll.

Yet there was nothing intrinsically absurd about the WMD fears, or ignoble about opposition to Saddam's tyranny - however late Washington developed this. The purported link between Baghdad and al-Qaeda, by contrast, was never believed by anyone who knows Iraq and the region. It was and is nonsense, the sort of "intelligence" true believers in the Bush camp lapped up from clever charlatans they sponsored such as the now disgraced Ahmad Chalabi. Yet, even this week, vice-president Dick Cheney continues to assert Saddam had "long-established ties with al-Qaeda".

No wonder that, until recently, polls regularly showed more than half of Americans believed Iraq was behind the attack on New York's twin towers.

Whether the Osama and Saddam thesis was more the result of self-delusion or cynical manipulation, it - along with Washington's mismanagement of the whole Iraqi adventure - has been enormously damaging.

The Bush administration has misled the American people. It has isolated the US, as American diplomats and commanders pointed out this week. And its bungling in Iraq has given new and terrifying life to the cult of death sponsored by Osama bin Laden. Above all, it inspires little confidence it is capable of defeating the spreading al-Qaeda franchise, which always was the clear and present danger.