Editorial: Too clever for their own good

Friday, Sept. 19, 2003 | 9:17 a.m.

On Wednesday President Bush said there is no evidence linking Saddam Hussein to the 9-11 terrorist attacks. The president's statement is part of an effort by the White House in the past few days to concede that there wasn't such a connection. The backdrop to all of this is a recent Washington Post poll in which 69 percent of those surveyed said Saddam was involved in the terrorist attacks. The irony is that this misguided view didn't develop in a vacuum. All along it has been the White House, especially in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, that has intimated that a link existed.

One example of this misleading campaign can be found in an important speech on Iraq that Bush delivered last year in Cincinnati. Notice how in the following passage the president weaves together al-Qaida, 9-11 and Saddam to make one of the administration's arguments for invading Iraq: "We know that Iraq and al-Qaida have had high-level contacts that go back a decade. Some al-Qaida leaders who fled Afghanistan went to Iraq. ... We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaida members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after September the 11th, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America." The president and his advisers, prior to this week, did not explicitly say that Saddam orchestrated the attacks against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. But by cleverly juxtaposing Iraq, al-Qaida and 9-11 in speeches and in their other public comments they left people with the false impression that Iraq played a role.

Removing Saddam from power was a just cause, but the administration's deceiving statements before the war have come back to haunt the White House. The administration's giddy optimism about how we'd be viewed as liberators, and its failure to present a coherent post-war reconstruction plan, also have contributed to a significant decline in support for Bush's Iraq policy. (A CBS News poll released Wednesday found that only 22 percent of Americans believe the White House has a clear plan for rebuilding Iraq while 64 percent don't.) Opposition isn't coming from just Democrats -- some Republicans in Congress also are questioning our current Iraq policy. The slide in support can be halted -- but it will require the president to more than just say there wasn't a Saddam connection to 9-11. To reclaim the support he is losing for his Iraq policy, he has to start le veling with the American people about what's happening in Iraq and acknowledging how difficult the road ahead will be.