Gore: No Connection Between Japan and Germany! I mean... Al-Qaeda and Iraq!

Former Vice President Al Gore gave a speech today in which he attacked President Bush for alleged claims of an Al-Qaida/Iraq connection. Citing many of the Founding Fathers of the USA, he attempted to prove that President Bush and his administration are attempting to overthrow democracy like Julius Caeser did back in the times of the Roman Emperor. He claims that no credible evidence of any connection.

In the fall of 2002, the President told the country "You can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and Saddam" and that the "true threat facing our country is an al Qaeda-type network trained and armed by Saddam." At the same time, Vice President Cheney was repeating his claim that "there is overwhelming evidence there was a connection between al Qaeda and the Iraqi government."... By the Spring, Secretary of State Powell was in front of the United Nations claiming a "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al-Qaeda terrorist network."...But after the invasion, no ties were found...The Bush administration's objective of establishing U.S. domination over any potential adversary led to the hubristic, tragic miscalculation of the Iraq war, a painful adventure marked by one disaster after another based on one mistaken assumption after another...

While I have to give Gore credit for managing to find a way to work the vocabulary word hubristic into a sentence, the rest of his argument simply does not hold water. Even setting aside the evidence that Ward has mentioned below showing that there were connections between Iraq and Al-Qaeda, though admittedly not directly about 9/11, the argument is absurd. Let us apply it to the case of World War II. After Pearl Harbor, the U.S.A. had been attacked by Japan. Other than a paper treaty which Japan showed no tendency to honor, there was no direct link between Japan and Germany. There is even evidence that Hitlet was incensed when he learned of the attack. (My understanding is he wanted to either leave us alone until Europe was mopped up, or recruit Mexico to attack us instead.) Yet, after declaring War on Japan, we immediately jumped into WW2 and attacked Germany as well. Why?! There was no direct connection concerning the attack on Pearl Harbor?!



The fact is, in the case of WW2, once Japan had attacked us, we were in the war and an attack from Germany - or support for the Japanese from Germany - was inevitable. We had been drawn into a war against our will, but once in the war we had to fight to win and that meant fighting all three powers with the same goals: fascist domination. Al-Qaeda and Sadaam's regime had a similar common goal: humiliation of the West - especially the USA, destruction of Israel, and Islamic domination. (Osama Bin Laden wants fundamentalist domination, Sadaam wants secular islamist domination - close enough.) Once we were at war with one, we have to fight to win and that means war with both. Given time, Sadaam's forces would have used the opportunity presented by 9/11 either to directly attack the U.S. or its allies, or to supply our enemies with whatever weapons he had available.,



Don't get me wrong, I am very nervous about the Doctrine of Preemption. But Mr. Gore's argument is just silly and completely misses the point.