The Real Connection Between Iraq and 9/11

When this idea came to mind not long ago, it gave me a chuckle, and so I thought I might share it. I won't claim, however, that it's totally original -- I may simply have heard it years ago from a progressive talk show host like Thom Hartmann or Sam Seder and I just don't remember that I did, so if you've heard this one already, feel free to criticize. Anyway, to put it in a form that Alex Trebek could appreciate: Can you name the Bush/Cheney administration's 2 biggest screw-ups?

So there you have the real connection between Iraq and 9/11. Given the huge numbers of people who suffered and died as a result of those screw-ups, the chuckle doesn't last long, and has a dark edge to it. The thought arose, though, as I mulled over the implications of a recent Mother Jones article I'd read that explains why Jeb Bush can't seem to answer any questions about Iraq.

The MoJo article centers around Paul Wolfowitz, who acted as one of the chief architects of the Bush/Cheney adventure in Iraq. Evidently, Mr. W. took his national security cues, at least in part, from a book by a Harvard professor centering around a grand theory that could be titled Saddam Did It All. And by all, this professor meant not just 9/11, but also the year 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, the 1998 Embassy bombings in Africa, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. Not having read the book, but only the MoJo article, I don't know if the professor also connected Saddam to D.B. Cooper or the Zodiac Killer, but I would guess all Mr. Hussein's crimes, according to this Harvard author, occurred after the Iran/Iraq war ended in 1988, since, as former Attorney General Ramsey Clark reminded us in his book The Fire This Time, Saddam only became an enemy of the U.S. after he stopped killing Iranians.

While such grand unifying connections might exist on rare occasions, this one greatly strains the bounds of believability to those of us who live in the reality-based community that the Bush administration spoke of with such disdain. The theory doesn't make much logical sense, and doesn't fit basic facts, but it does explain much of what the Bush/Cheney bunch did. It explains the excitement they clearly showed when announcing Saddam's capture, which always seemed strange to me. It also explains so many of the Bush/Cheney missteps, from the failure to capture bin Laden when they had him cornered to the failure to plan for an occupation of Iraq following the end of armed conflict, and even to the failure to heed pre-9/11 intelligence warnings of an impending attack. If Saddam did it all, then capturing him would stop all the really bad things from happening.

Those of us in the reality-based community know that the real world doesn't work like this, even for those who want to build an empire and create their own reality by doing so. Older right-wingers sometimes seem to miss the old Soviet Union because during the Cold War it functioned as a unifying enemy. The fall of the evil empire left behind a world that's much too complex to fit their simplistic evil vs. good formula. However, because they only see the world through that 2-toned lens, they connect the dots and tie together those who have become adversaries of the U.S., with no understanding of the forces that drive those adversaries. The bad guys must hate us for our freedoms, and not because we steal their oil and drop bombs on their heads, simply because they're bad guys, and not real people with real reasons for doing what they do. Timothy McVeigh had a much different motivation for detonating his truck bomb than the Ramzi Yousef bunch did when they detonated theirs, but right-wingers need to tie them all together and link them to Saddam because that view can fit into the right-wing mind, whereas the complex reality cannot.

So therein lies Jeb Bush's dilemma. He believes in this bogus Saddam connection to 9/11, as do, evidently, his brother, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz and the core of Dubya's national security contingent, as well as others from the PNAC (Project for a New American Century) crowd and the like, but what can he say when the liberal (fact-based) media comes around with their gotcha questions about Iraq? If he tells them the truth, he knows they'll rip him to shreds because he can't back it up with facts, yet he doesn't want to deny the truth because he wants to give potential voters a sign that he knows the truth just as they do, and if they elect him for the big national security job, he'll keep them safe from the same phantoms that they all believe in, since he believes in those phantoms as well. The truth is that the real connection between Saddam and 9/11 exists only in the minds of a delusional Harvard professor, the Bush brothers, Cheney, Wolfowitz and other right-wingers, but unfortunately, the bad decisions that these types make based on such delusions can have catastrophic real-world consequences, and that's a fact.

Ayn Randed Part 6: Self-interest, Enlightened or Not

To conclude, or not to conclude: that became a question when, in writing the previous segment, I filled five paragraphs and got to my punch line without covering all the major ideas I had wanted to mention. What more do I need to say? Well, having relearned the value of honesty and self-respect from Ayn Rand's writing, I found many of her own pronouncements strangely at odds with the essence of one of her central philosophical conceits, as if she crafted an entire philosophy without understanding its wider implications.

After cutting myself free from the anchor of Christian fundamentalism that I had grown up with, I drifted for a while, and toyed with the idea that I didn't actually need a moral compass. Soon enough, and possibly as a consequence of that thought, a pair of low-level criminals who actually lived the reality of that idea would become part of my social circle. While I initially accepted them as new friends, it didn't take too long for me to decide that I didn't need or want to continue having any contact with either of them. At that junction, I discovered Ayn Rand's work, and reading her writings reminded me of the value of honesty and self-respect, as well as the connection between those two concepts.

Ms. Rand makes the point in her philosophy that a criminal lacks self-respect, and hungers for it, because his own mind tracks his actions and convicts him of his own wrong-doing, no matter how much he may try to cover that self-knowledge with rationalization and/or mind-altering substances. The thief knows somewhere inside his head that he is a worthless thief, and so he can never fully respect himself. I recognized this reality in the two criminals that had become acquaintances, and understanding this helped me to determine that I didn't really want these two jerks as friends. It also led me to ask myself about the worth of my own integrity, and to answer myself that I certainly valued it more than an extra handful of coins that a cashier might have given me by mistake. From then on, if the person at the register added in an extra nickel, I would give it back, and feel very good about doing so.

Cheaters never prosper, or so goes a saying that many children learn early in life. Expand that thought just a bit by considering long-term implications, and you have Ms. Rand's essential concept of enlightened self-interest. In this regard, it's truly not in a student's enlightened self-interest to cheat on an exam rather than to acquire the knowledge to answer test questions correctly.

However, in real life, cheaters not only prosper, but often outshine their more-principled colleagues. The cheater may score the undeserved high grade-point average, the unearned college diploma, and the unmerited highly-compensated cushy corner office. Then, those who suffer the fallout of the cheater's lack of requisite knowledge may very well be good, honest, well-meaning types who have the misfortune of finding themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. Who knows the degree to which professional incompetence played a role in, say, the recent oil spill near Santa Barbara? In the aftermath of such a catastrophe, incompetent management and the usual focus on maximum profitability seem neither enlightened nor self-interested, particularly when those factors often create the trigger for catastrophe. Yet, the cheaters of the petrochemical industry seem to prosper handsomely while the environment and those of us who have to live with the real-world repercussions of their short-sighted, unenlightened self-interest pick up the tab.

When I read about Ms. Rand's concept of enlightened self-interest, I pictured something quite far-reaching, so it surprised me when I read AR quotes that seemed to contradict the central principle of that written philosophy. In the real world, though, the kind of people attracted to such a catch phrase largely tend to relish the sound of the self-interest part but have little or no interest in the enlightened segment, and within that circle I would include the one who evidently originated the phrase. While I have actually heard the story of one Wall Street banker who walked away from a lucrative career out of concern for the long-term implications of the financial shenanigans that had become routine in his workplace, most of the members of the Wall Street gang focus their tunnel vision on quarterly profit margins, with no second thought for how their selfish greed may reap havoc and destruction on the financial system that serves them so well. They know plenty about self-interest but nothing about enlightenment. In most cases, the selfish ones, be they bankers, oil barons or some other species of greed-head, simply boil it down to "If it's self-interest, it's enlightened" with no further thoughts, and evidently, that's about as deep as the original objectivist got into it herself when she first put it down on paper. Not long after I tired of her simplistic philosophy, I came around to thinking that the more enlightened you are, the more you recognize that your self-interest aligns with the best interests of your entire community, or, as Jim Hightower and a few others have mentioned, "We all do better when we all do better.