Iraq, Al Qaeda, and what constitutes a 'relationship'

[nosmokes]

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By Dante Chinni
WASHINGTON – For the past few days, the dialogue in this town has sounded more like "Sex and the City" than "The McLaughlin Group." Suddenly the question of what constitutes a relationship has come to the fore. We're not talking J. Lo here, we're talking about the Bush administration and whether its definition of "relationship" fits with everyone else's.

Last week, the 9/11 Commission released a report saying, among other things, that there was no "collaborative relationship" between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The press jumped on the story, saying the Bush administration has been proven wrong. The White House, however, quickly countered that it had never said that Iraq was involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks; it had simply argued that there was a connection.

"There was a relationship between Iraq and Al Qaeda," President Bush said. "The evidence is overwhelming" that there was a relationship, Vice President Cheney said.

What kind of relationship? Well, that's not clear. The commission reported that, beyond the Sept. 11 attacks, there were indeed contacts between Al Qaeda and Iraq but that Iraq rebuffed Al Qaeda's entreaties. Late last week, however, the vice president hinted that might not be the whole story.
~snip~

[agates]

1. This sounds like teens

For whom the question is, "do we have a label?"

[Parche]

2. Sounds like

We never said they HAD weapons of mass deception
We just said they were thinking about it.

In the beginning, we never said that we wanted a regime change
We just said that Saddam needed to be removed.

We never said that Iraq went to Niger for Uranium cake
We said that Iraqi's like Betty Crocker instead

[Miss Authoritiva]

3. Semantics is one thing, dearie, war-stoking propaganda is another.

"All of which means, what we probably have here is an issue of semantics."

This column is the type of journalism I mentally file under "Good God, and people actually get paid to write this crap."

The segue from "Sex and the City" to the Bush Administration's rationales for war-making is wince-provoking. Thousands of people have died; let's not reduce the reality of the death and destruction to the vapidity of a fictional cable comedy series.

If the Bush Administration wants to claim that it sincerely and legitimately used such words as "relationships," "links," "ties," and "associations," then they just made one more catastrophically bad decision.

Let's face it: They treated the American people like so many willing suckers waiting to get taken in an elaborate scam.