The Young Turks

The parts of the conference that the press has been focusing on are when the president said there was no WMD in Iraq and Saddam had no connection to 9/11. But actually that's not quite what he said. At one point Bush said:

"Nobody's ever suggested that the attacks of September the 11th were ordered by Iraq."

He also said no one in his administration had suggested that Saddam Hussein had ordered the attack.

But right before those statements, the president said:

"Imagine a world in which Saddam Hussein was there, stirring up even more trouble in a part of the world that had so much resentment, so much hatred that three ... that people came and killed three thousand of our citizens."

There it is in a nutshell: We didn't say he ordered the attacks, we just said he came from "a part of the world" that had "so much hatred" that "people came and killed three thousand of our citizens."

First of all, the part of the world he's referring to is actually Saudi Arabia and Egypt, where a great majority of the 9/11 attackers were from. But those countries are our allies, which proved very inconvenient for the wars we wanted to start. So, they tricked people into believing it was Iraq instead.

Now they say they never claimed Iraq ordered the attacks - just that they were from that "part of the world." Could you imagine if Roosevelt hit China after Pearl Harbor? And his excuse was, "The Pearl Harbor attackers came from that part of the world."

That is almost exactly what Bush has done here.

Other than being hideously misleading, this "part of the world" excuse is also flat out racist. The Al Qaeda guys were Arab Muslims, the Iraqis are Arab Muslims - good enough. There is absolutely nothing else that connects 9/11 and Iraq and it is a great discredit to our country that we have not been able to see through that for all this time simply because some of the people in Iraq are the same ethnicity as the 9/11 attackers.

Of course, as all racists do, we have also maligned the wrong people. Iraq is mainly Shiite and they are not the same religious sect as Al Qaeda. In fact, they are mortal enemies. The Kurds in northern Iraq aren't even Arabs. And the Sunnis who ruled Iraq under Saddam Hussein were secular and hence the direct opponents of Al Qaeda.

Why were these painfully obvious points not made when Dick Cheney said all the way back on August of 2003:

"If we're successful in Iraq... we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Why has no one in the press challenged this awful "geographic base" argument for so long? Will someone ask the president what they mean by "geographic base" or "that part of the world"?

I'd at least like to thank the president for clarifying this week how exactly they manipulated words and phrases to get the American people to believe Iraq was connected to 9/11, while claiming they never did any such thing.

PS - Here's the audio of President Bush's press conference where he made these statements and our analysis of his statements.