IT'S IN THE WATER

Condi Rice was talking about Iraq to Juan Williams on NPR this morning. In response to questions about the 9/11 Commission's insistence that Saddam and Al Qaeda weren't working together, she talked about the "contacts" between Al Qaeda and Iraq, then said,

Why would you leave this threat in the world's most dangerous region?

The Bushies, or at least Rice and Rumsfeld, keep returning to this message: that it doesn't matter whether Saddam and bin Laden were actually working together to export terror to the U.S., and it doesn't matter whether there was actually any evidence that they intended to work together -- they were bad, and they were neighbors; what more do you need to know? Even though the idea of collaboration was rejected by Iraq, it would surely just happen, by ... osmosis or something, because, well, they lived near each other.

And the result, inevitably, would be another 9/11:

What we knew going into the war was that this man [Saddam Hussein] was a threat... He was sitting astride one of the most volatile regions in the world, a region out of which the ideologies of hatred had come that led people to slam airplanes into buildings in New York and Washington.

--Rice, 7/30/03

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.

--Dick Cheney, 9/14/03

A clever way to fudge the facts, given that a large percentage of Americans couldn't find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map, and think all angry Muslims essentially think exactly alike.

(Last two quotes via Spinsanity.)