America Conor O'CleryWith seven in 10 Americans believing Saddam Hussein was somehow behind 9/11, the administration's role in developing this misperception has come under scrutiny from an increasingly sceptical US media. In January, for example, President Bush said: "Before September 11th, many in the world believed Saddam Hussein could be contained." On May 1st he told Americans: "The battle in Iraq is one victory in the war on terror that began on September 11th, 2001."
As recently as Sunday, Vice-President Dick Cheney stunned intelligence analysts when he described Iraq as "the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years but most especially 9/11". They were learning "more and more" about the Saddam-al-Qaeda connection, Cheney added, as if privy to sensitive new intelligence. He then went on to repeat a claim, discounted by US and Czech officials, that one of the hijackers, Mohammed Atta, may have met an Iraqi official in Prague before the attacks.
Immigration records show Atta was in Virginia at the time. Pressed on the same programme, Cheney said "Yea, I did mis-speak" in claiming outrageously on the eve of the war that Iraq had "reconstituted nuclear weapons". Vincent Cannistraro, formerly CIA director of counter-terrorism operations who testified to the Senate this week, stated flatly: "There was no substantive intelligence information linking Saddam to international terrorism before the war." What Cheney said on Sunday was "astounding", he added, but if something was repeated often enough, "then people become convinced it's the truth".
In reality "now we've created the conditions that have made Iraq the place to come to attack Americans."
Under fire by angry senators, Bush was forced to concede on Wednesday: "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 11th." Cheney is also coming under fire from senators over favouritism shown to his former company, Halliburton. A $37.5 million no-bid contract in February to put out oil fires has soared in value to $2 billion and could go as high as $7 billion.
Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy stated furiously in a speech to the National Press Club in Washington: "There was no imminent threat, the whole thing was a fraud made up in Texas to boost Republicans." He went on to charge the administration with bribing foreign leaders to send troops with half of the $4 billion per month the war is costing. Watch this space.
LAST week Paul Wolfowitz also "mis-spoke" when he said the administration knew Iraq "had a great deal to do with terrorism in general and with al-Qaeda in particular" and that a "great many" of Osama bin Laden's key lieutenants are now trying to organise in co-operation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime." Next day the Deputy Defence Secretary confessed he should have been more precise and that "a great many" of bin Laden's lieutenants actually referred to a single Jordanian, Abu Musab Zarqawi - whose base in Iraq was outside Saddam Hussein's control but who got hospital treatment in Baghdad.
WITH less than half of Americans (43 per cent) convinced that the war was worth the loss of life and other costs, the President is looking more vulnerable in 2004. This made the entry of Gen Wesley Clark into the Democratic race this week particularly bad news for the White House. Many Republican strategists believe that Democratic front-runner Howard Dean is too far to the left to be electable and that the four-star general will be harder to beat on security issues. Apparently many Democrats also feel the same and have been looking for a respectable anti-war counter-weight to Dean. These apparently include Bill and Hillary Clinton, the dominant figures of the party.
Officially neutral, Clinton has gone out of his way to praise Clark, a fellow Arkansas native. And many of the old Clinton gang were there on Wednesday when "the general" - as his staff call him - announced his candidacy in Little Rock.
They included former governor Jim Guy Tucker, actress Mary Steenburgen, and Clinton confidante Skip Rutherford. Also advising Clark are former Clinton aides Mark Fabiani, Eli Segal and Ron Klain, former White House lawyer Bruce Lindsey and, most significantly, Clinton's 1992 campaign chairman Mickey Kantor.
When Clark convened his first conference call he was joined by other ex-White House figures such as chief-of-staff John Podesta and press secretary Mike McCurry. This is Clinton redux. But some Democrats suspect deeper motives behind the Clinton string-pulling. Perhaps Clark will turn out to be a weak candidate, the Democrats will lose and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will have the field to herself in 2008. Hillary's fund-raisers, or "Hill's Angels" as they call themselves, have not quite given up on their heroine running next year. She denies it but her husband continues to stoke the fires, saying just the other day: "That's really a decision for her to make." Maybe the endgame is a Clinton-Clark ticket - or vice versa. Anything can happen, and Democrats are giddy with intrigue.
WITH all the excitement over Clark, few noticed that Senator John Edwards of North Carolina also formally entered the race this week, after months of campaigning. Just beforehand he appeared on Comedy Central's spoof nightly TV news report to keep a long-standing promise to announce first on the programme.
Presenter Jon Stewart thanked him and asked innocently: "If you become president and you're going to start a war with another country will you announce it on this show." "I kept this stupid promise already," replied Edwards. But in American politics th1ese days, who knows?