Watching Clinton's interview on 60 Minutes last night made me realize how little has changed the last four years, at least in terms of political spin. With the Big Dog, it was trying to parse the meaning of the word "is" before the Starr Inquest, over the critical issue of whether he was involved with an intern. Now, it's a new crowd trying to salvage some measure of dignity before the country by claiming that, at the very least, Saddam had "connections", or "ties" to Al Qaeda, as opposed to the two parties actually collaborating together in the trenches before 9-11. Just as Prime Minister Blair was able to change the subject from his government's reckless use of false claims about Iraq's WMD's by attacking the BBC's use of the term, "sexing up", so too are Cheney and the Bushies by asserting that what matters most is not that the Iraqi government was working hand-in-glove with Bin Laden, but that they had at least a tangential relationship with Al Qaeda.

Somehow, I don't think the American people would have backed a war with Iraq if they had known that Hussein's people had spoken with OBL's on a couple occasions, but had not collaborated on terrorist attacks against the U.S.; in fact, by that standard, it could be argued that Al Qaeda had much stronger "connections" to the Bush Administration than it did to Saddam, since the President was friendly with the Bin Laden family, and the U.S. provided much of the funding received by the Mujhadeen in the '80's. Certainly, as far as real "ties" with Al Qaeda are concerned, there was a far greater circumstantial case to be made against the "friendly" governments of Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, but we didn't go to war with those countries.

The whole point of the war, according to the Bushies, was that Saddam was an imminent threat, and that he was an ally of the people who attacked us on September 11. The war was sold to the American People has a front in the larger war against terrorism. But now we're hearing that the war was really about something else, like changing the political dynamic of the Middle East, or "liberating" the Iraqi people, or, now, that Saddam, or one of his Ba'athist associates, had met on occasion with representatives of Bin Laden. If our spy services were doing their job, I would hope that we would have also met with representatives of Bin Laden on occasion, if only to gather intel or suborn a potential asset. I'm sure Jenkins' Foot or the assasination of the Archduke will factor in at some point with these people, but for now, the rationalization of hundreds of American(and thousands of Iraqi) deaths because of a few low-level meetings between Iraq and Al Qaeda seems like a cruel joke.