House of Cards
There is a smoking gun.
Unfortunately -- and to the disgrace of a basically decent man -- it is in the hands of Colin Powell, who finds himself touting the flimsy, exaggerated and often phony evidence of alleged links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda.
From the beginning, the 9/11 attacks that horrified the world have been cynically exploited by this administration as a golden opportunity to settle an old Bush family score with Hussein. Even as we went justifiably to war against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, the White House kept inexplicably hinting that Iraq would be next. But why? After all, Iraq's arsenal, eviscerated by war, inspections and bombing raids, was not a pressing threat.
One answer is that Hussein, hunkered down in Baghdad, was a handy stand-in for Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar, both of whom have not been brought to account as promised by George W. Bush. This was especially convenient for a powerful clique of White House "chicken hawks" -- so called because they are quick to support war but managed to avoid service themselves -- who were eager to dust off a decade-old plan to seize Iraq as the first step in redrawing the map of the Middle East and, incidentally, gaining control of its oil.
In normal times, the selling of this imperial fantasy to a properly skeptical public, both at home and abroad, would have been impossible. But if Hussein could be linked to the mass murderers of 9/11? Piece of cake. That is why the good soldier Powell in his United Nations speech labored gamely to establish such a connection.
The main evidence presented by the secretary of State was a satellite photo of a forlorn outpost, allegedly linked to Hussein and Al Qaeda and which Powell claims is in the business of producing chemical weapons. However, the camp is outside the area controlled by Hussein and is in the northern Kurdish region protected by U.S. and British warplanes. It is run by the Islamic fundamentalist group Ansar al-Islam, which has a history of opposing both the secular Hussein and his equally secular rivals in the dominant Kurdish group, one of whose leaders was assassinated Monday.
Later it was revealed that the United States had had this camp under surveillance for months and could have taken it out on one of many recent bombing runs.
