The weakest link: why the Bush administration insists against all evidence on an Iraq-al Qaeda connection.

• Author: Ackerman, Spencer

After weeks of plummeting public support for his handling of postwar Iraq, President Bush took the offensive last month. In a barrage of speeches, Bush and his senior ,aides argued fervently that the invasion was justified and the United States was making progress on the war's stated aims. But while it's true that the destruction of Saddam Hussein's reign of terror is an unqualified benefit, the rest of the administration's predictions about the war's aftermath have not panned out.

Any post-Saddam euphoria felt by the Iraqi people--who, Vice President Dick Cheney declared before the war, would greet U.S. troops "as liberators"--has given way to ambivalence, as a recent Gallup poll attests; meanwhile, American troops are fighting a protracted guerrilla war in central Iraq which claims, on average, the life of one soldier every day. The administration also promised that ore" allies would fall into line behind us once the war was over, that Iraqi oil would finance much of the country's reconstruction, and that neighboring despotic regimes would bend to our will. Instead, most of our traditional allies have refused to support our efforts with either troops or money; Iraqi oil production will almost certainly yield insufficient revenue to rebuild the country over the next few years; and Iran has apparently redoubled its efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, while Syria and Saudi Arabia have allowed their own home-grown terrorists to flood into Iraq.

Most importantly, however, the Bush administration's chief justification for the war--that Saddam placed American security in "grave and gathering danger"--has slowly come unraveled. Before the war, the president and members of his administration argued that Saddam had large stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an ongoing nuclear program, and that he might provide such weapons to terrorists, specifically al Qaeda, who could then attack an American city and "leave no fingerprints," as Bush put it in a televised address last October. The first part of that equation did not long survive the fall of Baghdad. As actual weapons of mass destruction proved elusive after months of occupation, administration officials began to speak of the existence of weapons "programs." And when, after three months of searching, the 1,200-member team led by David Kay issued an interim report, it indicated that the few remain-ing components of Saddam's pre-Gulf War I weapons programs weren't likely to have yielded actual weapons while international sanctions remained in place. In light of this evidence, the administration resorted to legalisms. Cheney argued in a speech in mid-October that Kay's report "confirms a material breach by the former Iraqi regime of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441." But by abandoning the language of thousands of liters of VX, sarin, anthrax, and plague, at least they were no longer denying the obvious.

That can't be said, however, for the other half of the administration's doomsday scenario: Saddam's reputed partnership with al Qaeda. So intent were some in the White House to convince voters of such a connection that last September, Cheney raised the possibility that Saddam's regime had direct ties to the 9/11 hijackers on "Meet the Press" The speciousness of Cheney's statement was so apparent that the president himself found it necessary to note publicly that there was no evidence of such a link. But administration officials have continued to insist that there were clear connections between Iraq and al Qaeda...