White House: Iraq-Qaeda Ties Exist

By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer

Sometimes reality matters less than perception.

For nearly two years, President Bush and senior administration officials claimed links between Saddam and al Qaeda while allowing the impression that Iraq could have been behind the Sept. 11 attacks – an impression that could have lent support to the war in Iraq.

The administration never outright said Saddam directed or contributed to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, just that the now fallen Iraqi dictator supported terrorists, as National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice has put it.

"It is always difficult to prove a negative. Can you prove there was no al Qaeda in Iraq? What you can say is there is no proof of the positive," said James Dobbins, the first special envoy for Afghanistan during the Bush administration and current director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at the Rand Corporation.

"There is al Qaeda in Indonesia, Canada, Saudi Arabia. Were there al Qaeda in Iraq from time to time? Probably. It would be surprising if there hadn't been," he continued. "Was there any substantial degree of complicity by the Iraqi regime? The answer is there doesn't appear to be any evidence to that affect."

In September 2003, for the first time, President Bush stated explicitly that, "we've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th." But he stood by claims that Iraq and al Qaeda had ties. "There is no question," he added.

There is certainly is some question now, according to the bipartisan commission.

The panel disclosed Wednesday that "Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded."

The commission added that while there has been "reports" that "contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida also occurred," any possible contacts "do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship."

Vice President Dick Cheney has led the administration's charge on the Iraq-al Qaeda ties, repeatedly stating that Sept. 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta met with Iraqi agents in Prague only months prior to the attacks.

The CIA and FBI have refuted those claims, citing lack of evidence and even some indications that Atta was in Florida at the time of the alleged Prague meeting.

Asked Tuesday about Cheney's latest comments, President Bush said Tuesday that "the best evidence of connection to al Qaeda affiliates and al Qaeda" is Musab al Zarqawi, an alleged al Qaeda operative said to be behind many of the recent insurgent attacks in Iraq.

But Zarqawi's role began after the war in Iraq started, after dozens of assertions of ties by the Bush administration.

A Washington Post poll in August 2003 found that 69 percent of Americans believed Iraq was "likely" behind the Sept. 11 attacks.

"I think that it was an easy assumption for the American public to make and a hard one for them to give up on because the al Qaeda people come from that same dangerous part of the world and they shared a hatred of America with Saddam Hussein and that is the linkage in the minds," said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

"Part of it is the natural inclination of the American public post 9/11," he added. "I mean there are lots of ideas you can't get across to people no matter how hard you push them."

Kohut, a pollster by training, said his organization found that "for the American people," in the lead-up to the war in Iraq, "the most important reason for thinking about taking on Iraq was seeing it as part of the war on terrorism."

President Bush continues to bank his presidency on the war in Iraq being one and the same with the war on terror, absent any link between Saddam and terror attacks on the United States.

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry asserts that the Bush administration "misled" Americans when making the case for the war in Iraq.

Kerry states that no weapons of mass destruction – the administration's primary justification for war – have been found in Iraq. But he also speaks to an atmosphere that associated Iraq with the Sept. 11 attacks. Whether a voter agrees with this association is a key indicator of whether he or she will support Kerry or Mr. Bush on Election Day.

"The administration argument was that 9/11 demonstrated that there are people out there who are more than willing to... inflict mass casualties," Dobbins said. "Evidence also suggests that these people are looking to improve their capacity to inflict mass casualties through the acquisition of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons technology," he continued, summarizing the Bush administration argument.

"So if you are going to make a demonstrative effort to demonstrate to the world that that kind of behavior doesn't pay, Iraq was arguably a good place to start," he added. "Not because it was the most culpable but because it was culpable and it was the most vulnerable... The argument is not that there was a connection between Iraq and 9/11, the argument was there was a connection between 9/11 and Iraq."
By David Paul Kuhn