Well, now the right-wingers are just making stuff up:

They [i.e., "many in the nation's elite"] forget that we were attacked not just by a shadowy terrorist group called al Qaeda, but also by an anti-American and anti-Western ideology emanating from the Islamic world.

They forget that the foremost exponent of that anti-American and anti-Western ideology in the Islamic world was Saddam Hussein.

--New York Post op-ed piece by John Podhoretz today

The foremost exponent? Is he serious? Bin Laden, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the Taliban, Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Hamas -- what are they, chopped liver?