Richard Cohen Dicks Around in the WaPo

Ok, even worse than that last Jim Lobe article was this piece of absolute drivel by Richard Cohen, appearing in the Washington Post, which should at least fact check their biased articles for facts, instead of just bias.

I believe Cheney.

I believe the vice president when he claims that there was a link of some sort between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda -- and by intended implication with the events of Sept. 11, 2001. I believe, that is, that he is not necessarily lying, not making things up. I believe, in other words, that Cheney's -- and President Bush's -- insistence on this association is just more evidence that the two of them are blinkered by ideology and seeing precisely what they want.

Does he mean aside from all the undisputed links between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, or is he just being purposefully stupid? And I especially loved this phrase, "and by intended implication with the events of Sept. 11, 2001." Well, whoa there Dick. Wouldn’t that mean that alleging that Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito formed something called "The Axis" would "by implication" link Hitler to Pearl Harbor? Well I say this.

"Over? Did you say "over"? Nothing is over until we decide it is!
Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?"

Or maybe more appropriately I should quote Dean Wormer and tell Richard Cohen

"Fat, drunk, and stupid is no way to go through life, son."

I'll tell you a story. There was a man who went to see a psychiatrist. First, the shrink showed him a picture of crossed sticks and then one of hundreds of little dots. "What's that?" the shrink asked. Snakes and ants having sex, the man replied. The shrink told the man he was obsessed with sex. "What do you expect," the patient replied, "when you keep showing me dirty pictures?"

Well, everytime I take a Rorschach inkblot test I see Rachael Corrie, so what does that tell you about psychology? Yet on the one hand the paranoid moonbats keep screaming that Bush should've connected the dots on 9/11, and on the other they keep screaming at him for connecting the dots on 9/11. I guess it all has to do with your opposition to the picture those dots portray, and although both the Administration and the 9/11 Commission have been united in saying that there's not yet clear evidence that Saddam was directly complicit in 9/11, he and Al-Qaeda certainly maintained some ties. Just don't confuse "ties" with the Germans bombing Pearl Harbor, or even knowing what was up, or Bluto might have to straighten you out.

In life as in jokes, you see what you want. Cheney and Bush (protocol would insist on Bush first, but we know better) always saw a link between Hussein and al Qaeda. That link was tenuous at best, but it was supported by this or that meeting or sighting or the presence of someone in Iraq with links to Osama bin Laden. Aficionados of the Mafia will recognize the telltale signs. This person is linked to this person who is associated with that person who is married to yet another person who was once in business with the brother-in-law of yet another person. Once you have that mind-set, the Mafia is everywhere.

Well, first he trots out the "Bush is a sockpuppet" meme, then launches right in with trying to claim that the ties were that a friend of a friend of Osama's third cousin dated a guy who knew an Iraqi who'd once met Saddam. Actually what the intelligence clearly shows is that Osama sent on of his top lieutenants to Iraq, on an all expense paid trip, funded by Iraq's intelligence services, so this lieutenant could carry a message from Osama to Saddam, and receive instruction and information back. The lieutenant stayed in Iraq for a weak. That's one data point. There were forty-nine more before we even dug into the guts of the new data that's available. It's not quite your third cousin's half-sister, now is it?

It is the same with intelligence. Very little of it is definitive. We have learned that the hard way. Even the mobile chemical labs in Iraq precisely identified by spy satellites turned out to be something else. Human intelligence can be even more problematic. It turns out, after all, that we knew next to nothing about what was going on in Hussein's inner circle.

Yes, those mobile chemical labs somehow because artillery balloon trucks, which mysterious lacked hydrogen, hydrogen production chemical, any altitude sounders, transponders, receivers for the data, or even balloons. Heck, they didn't even have a crumb from a half-eaten sandwich dropped by the "balloon guy" in the clown suit. You'd think they'd have had at least one accessory, some little piece of equipement, useful for artillery balloons, especially when they should've been running around during the invasion release those balloons for the artillery. But oh well, looks like that was "disproven" to, eh?

Were there contacts between Hussein's regime and al Qaeda? Maybe.

Make that "definitely", given that even Al-Qaeda doesn't dispute it, nor does anyone else on the planet who's not part of the big media moonbat brigades.

It's not inconceivable that someone in the regime wanted to keep an ear open. Were those contacts nefarious? Who knows?

Oh I'm sure Saddam and Al-Qaeda wanted to hold a bake sale. Is there anything non-nefarious that Al-Qaeda is into these days?

Did they lead in some way to the events of Sept. 11? It appears not.

Except maybe to the people trying to figure out the likelihood that the Lt. Col in the Fedayeen Saddam attended the big 9/11 planning meeting, or whether the mysterious planner happened to have the exact same name as the Fedayeen officer.

No evidence suggests that's the case, and the lack of such evidence is not proof of anything. It is not up to the critics of the war to prove the negative any more than it is up to astronomers to prove that the dark side of the moon is not made of green cheese. A little intellectual discipline is in order here.

Oh, go shove your intellectual discipline up your arrogant, paranoid ass, Mr. Cohen. What you've written is pure garbage, and you know it.

It's not surprising that an administration already bent on war would interpret every dot, every squiggly line, as evidence that Hussein and bin Laden were in cahoots.

Well when you've got over fifty dots, many that say "X from Al-Qaeda met with Iraq Intelligence, who promised them Y", and you've got Al-Qaeda saying America must be destroyed and Saddam shouting "A-men!", those dots can tend to look a little connected.

This made sense to Bush and Cheney since, as we have found out to our dismay, they cannot distinguish between one kind of evil and another.

And this from a man who undoubtedly roots for a genocidal fascist dictator at every opportunity, when he's not trying to draw moral equivalence between summarily executing 400,000 innocent men, women, and children and making a failed suicide bomber wear ladies underwear on his head.

Every possible suggestion of cooperation somehow became proof.

Again, the people on the 9/11 Commission have come out and said that there's no question that there were many links between them.

This was particularly the case with Cheney when it came to weapons of mass destruction. He seized on the murkiest of reports to proclaim that Iraq had "reconstituted" its nuclear weapons program, which, lo these many months later, has yet to be found.

Aside from the nuclear centerfuge and clear statements by scientists that Saddam intended to restart his program as soon as sanctions were lifted, and the ongoing discovery of his equipment in junk yards scattered across the Middle East and Europe, which the UN now says was rapidly shipped out prior to, during, and after the war.

So deluded were our top guys that they invaded Iraq expecting that the major problem would be how to clean up after all the victory parades.

Hey, tell us about the clean-up from all that looting, since that's how everyone celebrated Saddam's downfall, by grabbing up anything that wasn't nailed down.

Was Cheney lying or was he merely so driven by ideological or intellectual conviction that to him the occasional tree became a forest?

And obviously Cohen is either lying or so blinded that he's lost deep in the woods of his own paranoid delusions. Every intelligence service in the world knew Saddam had major weapons program. The UN doesn't even dispute that he did. The question is what state were those programs in, and the whole point for the war was that it was up to Iraq to prove the state of those programs to our satisfaction, and this was something they would not do.

It's hard to say. As my colleague Al Kamen reports, the vice president did indeed say it was "pretty well confirmed" that one of the Sept. 11 terrorists, Mohamed Atta, had met in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence official. Actually, that meeting has never been confirmed, and Cheney, for obvious reasons, has recently unconfirmed his statement, insisting he was never so definitive. Kamen confirmed he was.

Well the Czech police still stand by the statement, and it stands as something not solid enough to consider definitive, but something unrefuted enough to give us pause. Combine this with the likelihood of the Fedayeen Saddam officer having attended the 9/11 planning meetings, and one might think that there's some reason to suspect, but not nearly enough to prove, a link on this issue. But even absent any such link, our case is sound, because it didn't rest on any link between Al-Qaeda and Iraq. Our position was that regimes that harbor international terrorists and play with weapons of mass destruction will not be allowed to become an imminent threat. There's no question Saddam played with WMD, as the recent attack with a sarin gas shell makes clear. You can't have a roadside bomber accidentally use one of those in a country that doesn't have any. Further, Saddam backed Palestinian terror groups whole heartedly and publicly, and allowed many international terrorists, such as Abu Abbas and Abu Nidal, a free pass to live in Baghdad, safe from prosecution.

But just as Cheney and Bush missed the forest for the trees, so do those who defend them and insist that the Sept. 11 commission overstated the case by reporting (in a draft) that "no collaborative relationship" existed between Iraq and al Qaeda.

You know, all his "forest for the trees" blather is making me wonder why he manages to avoid pulling a Sony Bono sometime, because he's obviously slaloming through darkness, kicking up a blizzard of lies, with no idea where he is or what's going on. I suspect he'll slam into the tree of hard reality pretty shortly. As everyone knows, there was a collaborative relationship between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, though the fruitfulness of that relationship is open to question. Neither the Administration nor the 9/11 Commission members dispute this.

The fact remains that Hussein's fingerprints are not on the attacks of Sept. 11 and that the United States went to war for stated reasons that have simply evaporated -- weapons of mass destruction and that vaporous link between two very bad men.

Our case for war didn't rest on the existance of weapons of mass destruction, merely Saddam's refusal to cooperate in proving their non-existence and destroying any that did exist. He failed to do this. We also stated that we will no longer abide regimes that support international terrorists, and there's no disputing that Saddam supported them publicly, giving them money, refuge, and training. We didn't say this was a war on just Al-Qaeda. We said it was a war on international terrorism and those regimes that might supply them with weapons of mass destruction, while in contravention of a cease fire agreement and countless UN resolutions. So I guess Cohen is so vague about why we went to war that I'm surprised he's even aware that we fought one.

This brings me not to a joke but to the wisdom of the late Don Quixote, who says something to remember when this or that intelligence report is trumpeted by Cheney or Bush in justification of an unjustified war.

"Facts are the enemy of truth."

So what's with the left in finding absolutely any reason to support a genocidal National Socialist dictator? Are they really in love with fascism, or is it just fashionable for them to appear so? Maybe that's why they have to look to Don Quixote as a logician, not realizing he wrote parodies about stupid people.