Demosophia

And Speaking of the Sleep of Reason

Gerard's post on American Digest about the emergence of monsters from the "sleep of reason" provides a segue for me to vent a bit about the recent CNN "dialogue" between talk show hosts Armstrong Williams and Bernie Ward. Ward was nearly hopping out of his seat in his eagerness to point out to Williams that Iraq was "no threat" to the US, that there is no link between Saddam and al Qaeda, and that Iraq played no role in 9-11. Armstrong failed to take him to account in any meaningful way for repeating this meme, in spite of the fact that most of the CIA, including its director, now believes there was almost certainly a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda, which includes a rather strong possibility of some Hussein involvement in 9/11. This even after Bill Safire's NYT article discussing the revelations in the Weekly Standard and Slate.

WASHINGTON — Two blockbuster magazine articles last week revealed evidence that Saddam's spy agency and top Qaeda operatives certainly were in frequent contact for a decade, and that there is renewed reason to suspect an Iraqi spymaster in Prague may have helped finance the 9/11 attacks.

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In addition, I heard Wes Clark get away with using the "imminent threat" meme three times on one of the "Sunday Talk" shows this weekend, without being called on it. Conservatives like Armstrong have been a little too reluctant to point out the pig-headedness of the left in raising the specter of these non-arguments. The burden of proof now rests with the left to demonstrate that there was no Saddam/Qaeda link, and the consensus on the "imminent threat" idea is that Bush never made that argument at all, though they did talk about lowering the threshold for declaring an imminent threat (which isn't a bad idea, really).

Posted by Demosophist at November 25, 2003 02:00 PM | TrackBack