Doug Lorimer
US President George Bush used the fifth anniversary of 9/11 to tell the US public that their safety from future terrorist attacks would be decided by the "outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad".
"If we do not defeat these enemies now", Bush said in a nationally televised speech from the White House, "we will leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons".
Recent opinion polls show that six out of 10 US residents now oppose Washington's counterinsurgency war in Iraq. A September 7 CNN poll showed that 53% of the US public reject the idea that the Iraq war is part of the "war on terrorism", let alone being its "central battlefield" as Bush has repeatedly claimed.
In his speech, Bush said: "I'm often asked why we're in Iraq when Saddam Hussein was not responsible for the 9/11 attacks. The answer is that the regime of Saddam Hussein was a clear threat. My administration, the Congress and the United Nations saw the threat. And after 9/11, Saddam's regime posed a risk that the world could not afford to take." Bush did specify how Hussein's government was a "clear threat" to the US.
During the lead-up to the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Bush administration argued that Hussein's government posed an "imminent threat" because Iraq had an arsenal of "weapons of mass destruction" and had close ties to Saudi millionaire Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network.
US officials argued that Hussein's WMD, including possible nuclear weapons, might be handed over to al Qaeda to attack US cities. For example, on September 8, 2002, Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, told CNN: "The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons. But we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud."
The WMD claims have since been exposed as Bush administration fabrications.
On September 9, the US Senate intelligence committee released a report revealing that in 2002 the Pentagon's Defense Intelligence Agency had concluded that it was "unlikely" Iraq had provided al Qaeda with any weapons assistance. The report noted that in 2002 the CIA reported that its "assessment of al Qaeda's ties to Iraq rests on a body of fragmented, conflicting reporting from sources of varying reliability".
The committee's report also revealed that a post-invasion study by the CIA had concluded that Hussein "viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime" and that his government "did not have a relationship, harbor or turn a blind eye toward" al Qaeda-linked terrorists, including Abu Musab al Zarqawi.
Commenting on the report the next day on Fox News, Rice, who is now secretary of state, said: "We know that [Abu Musab al] Zarqawi was running a poisons network in Iraq. We know that Zarqawi ordered the killing of an American diplomat in Jordan from Iraq. There were ties between Iraq and al Qaeda."
Rice omitted to mention that, prior to the US-led invasion, the Jordanian-born Zarqawi was based in an area of Iraq outside the Hussein government's control — the US-British protectorate of Iraqi Kurdistan, administered by a coalition of US-allied Kurdish parties and militias.