[andyfox]

"This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda," Bush once said. "We did say there were numerous contacts between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda."

President Bush often mentioned Sept. 11 and Saddam Hussein's Iraq in his press conferences and televised speeches, often in the same breath. He never pinned blame for the attacks directly on Hussein. But the overall effect was to reinforce an impression that persisted among much of the American public: that the Iraqi dictator did play a direct role in the attacks. Polls in 2003 showed that 45 percent of Americans believed Hussein was "personally involved" in Sept. 11.

Yet right after Sept. 11, 2001, when Americans were asked open-ended questions about who was behind the attacks, only 3 percent mentioned Iraq or Hussein. But by January of 2003, miraculously, attitudes had been transformed. In a Knight Ridder poll, 44 percent of Americans reported that either "most" or "some" of the Sept. 11 hijackers were Iraqi citizens.

Polls also showed a strong correlation between those who saw the Sept. 11-Iraq connection and those who supported going to war in Iraq.

Later on, polls showed that three out of four Americans said that if Iraq did not have WMDs or suppport Al Qaeda, we shouldn't have gone to war.

So what are we to make of this? The conclusion is inescapable that the administration sought to foster a climate of opinion that would support its goal, a goal which prominent members of the administration had voiced publicly long before the 2000 election, and which was the subject of its very first national security meetings, of overthrowing the Hussein regime. 9/11 provided the pretext and an association between Hussein and Al Qaeda had to be played up, as did Hussein's WMDs.

SOP. It should come as no surprise.