The President Told The Truth

Yep, Bill Clinton did tell the truth. I was he originally insisted that Al Quaida and Saddam Hussein were partners in crime.

Last fall I spoke on a panel at a Washington think tank. The topic was Iraq, and the moderator wanted my reaction to what he termed Americans' "misperceptions" about the war. Among those he cited was a poll showing that 48% of Americans believed there had been a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

I responded by saying that the American people were perhaps wiser than the pundits who mock them. But hadn't President Bush just said there was no link? No, I replied, he had said that there was no evidence, so far, of a link between Iraq and 9/11, which was a very different thing. At least one of the audience members whose minds I didn't succeed in changing serves on the staff of the 9/11 Commission, which last week released an interim report attempting to muddle the same issue.

Editorialists and headline writers seized on the report as evidence that the Bush administration had exaggerated the Iraq-al Qaeda link. Some even demanded an apology. They didn't get one. "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda," the president responded, is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."