New Pentagon study reaffirms no Al Qaeda-Saddam link

Published March 11, 2008 @ 09:54AM PT

Council staff member Travis Sharp just posted this blog entry over at his blog, Iraq Insider. It's worth a read.

New Pentagon study reaffirms no Al Qaeda-Saddam link McClatchy reports that the Pentagon will release an exhaustive study of the old Iraqi regime's archives later this week that concludes that there was no "direct operational link" between Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda before the American invasion in 2003.

The new study, titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," went through more than 600,000 pages of Iraqi documents to reach its conclusion. It was completed by the federally-funded and widely respected Institute for Defense Analyses.

McClatchy takes us down the sorrowful pre-war threat hyping by the Bush administration:

President Bush and his aides used Saddam's alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq's supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had "bulletproof" evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam's secular dictatorship.

Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.

The fact that Saddam wasn't in bed with Al Qaeda shouldn't surprise anyone who keeps up with the news or is casually familiar with the Middle East. Saddam was a brutal secularist, not an Islamist theocrat, and Al Qaeda's goal of establishing a worldwide Islamic theocracy was anathema to Saddam's secular totalitarianism.

The really scary part, however, is that many people continue to believe, even after all this time, that Saddam had something to do with Al Qaeda's September 11 attacks.

For instance, a June 2007 Newsweek poll found that 41% of Americans answered 'Yes' to the question "Do you think Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq was directly involved in planning, financing, or carrying out the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001?" That 41% was actually a 5% increase over September 2004.

Scary.

A September 2007 CBS/NY Times poll found that 33% of respondents said they believe Saddam was "personally" involved in the 9/11 attacks. CBS News director Kathy Frankovic took a stab at explaining this almost unfathomable poll:

One reason might be related to the amount of time a person spends following news, something related to education and gender. Forty-four percent of those with a high school education or less say Saddam was personally involved in 9/11, while just 20 percent of college graduates say so. Thirty-eight percent of women think he was part of the attack, compared with 27 percent of men.

Another reason could involve feelings about the Iraq war itself, and the importance of reducing cognitive dissonance. The Iraq War has become a partisan issue - three in four Republicans say going to war was the right thing to do, while three in four Democrats say it was not. Nearly half of those who now say the Iraq war was the right thing to do connect 9/11 with Saddam. Consequently, 40 percent of Republicans believe Saddam was involved in 9/11, while just 27 percent of Democrats do.

[snip]

Apparently, linking one idea with another, even when it starts with a negative link, can reinforce the association between the two ideas. Howard Schuman, a University of Michigan professor emeritus and an expert in formulating polling questions, wrote in the American Association for Public Opinion Research’s member listserve about a phenomenon he observed in a Detroit-area study some years back. The Metropolitan Detroit cross-section sample was asked to identify "Joe McCarthy," he wrote. Here were some of the verbatim answers:

"Yes, a Senator accused of being a communist."
"Yes, Red communist Senator."
"Indicted for communism, a Senator?"
"Yes, communism, a Senator accused of communism."
"Yes, Joe McCarthy was a communist."
"They thought he was a communist but it was never proven."
"Communist leaning."
"Yes, Senator, communist."

Senator Joe McCarthy, of course, made a name for himself accusing other people of being communists.

Schuman called this inversion. “Inversions,” he wrote, “indicate that people (no doubt including ourselves) often remember or learn an association between two elements, but are at best vague as to its original nature.”

[snip]

Certainly, for many people, linking Saddam with 9/11 may be a case of inversion. For others, it may be wishful thinking to justify their current position on the Iraq war. Either way, it has been part of the belief system of about one-third of the country for many years, and that perception shows no sign of disappearing.

I guess I should celebrate that public ignorance is not as high now as it was during the lead up to the war. As Janet Elder detailed in the New York Times last October, a Times/CBS News poll in April 2003 found that 53% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks. Of course, responsibility for this travesty must be placed squarely in the lap of the Bush administration, which purposefully twisted intelligence to mount a PR offenisve for the war, and the mainstream media, which swallowed the administration's pre-war hype hook, line, and sinker.

Choose your favorite cliche to explain this sorry state of affairs within the American public when it comes to clinging on to the inane Saddam-Al Qaeda link. I call dibs on "You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink."