Some quick notes. Let's do this Larry King Style. Upon review, let's not. Carrage returns are Mr. Eyeball's friend.

Bush used 9/11 in all kinds of debates, but is it that unreasonable that 9/11 would change the cost-benefit calculus for the Patriot Act, or drilling in ANWR?...

You can fill hours and pages with quotes from Bush 41 cabinet officials about how it would have been a bad idea to march to Baghdad and finish Saddam. Of course, they all thought that he would stop being a problem when some ambitious general put a bullet in his politically weakened skull. That didn't happen, and he became the poster boy (together with Somalia) for the idea that America is soft....

Powell and Rice in early 2001 said that Saddam was under control, no longer a threat, that the sanctions were working. This was before we found out that Saddam had bribed Baron Sevan, head of the UN Oil for Food program, among hundreds of others, so Saddam could import pretty much whatever he could slip past the CIA...

I have a note here that just says Iraq-al Qaeda. Probably about conflation of Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Bush did overstate the connection when he said that there was no difference. W led with his chin, and Kerry let him have it. This note probably also refers to the Douglas Feith-Weekly Standard "Case Closed" memo. That's a longer rant, that I will address at length at some point.

I have a note that says IAEA worthless. Not sure why I wrote that, in terms of what Franken was talking about that I was responding too, but I'll just make the general point that the IAEA has proven to be a failure at preventing determined countries from acquiring nuclear weapons. North Korea and Pakistan have become nuclear weapons states or close enough while within the IAEA, and Iran either has or will. Iraq would have within the 1990s if not for the Gulf War. So I probably meant to write about how, post-9/11, the Bushes were not willing to take UNSCOM's word that Saddam's nuclear program was gone.

Seeking uranium from Africa. Just to start, and not to finish, but let's go with what Ambassador Joe Wilson told the CIA, according to NAtional REview, who based this on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and relied heavily on an article by the Washington Posts' Susan Schmidt.

A former prime minister of Niger, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, told Wilson that in
June 1999, a businessman approached him, insisting that he meet with an Iraqi
delegation to discuss "expanding commercial relations." Mayaki, knowing how few commodities for export are produced by impoverished Niger, interpreted that to mean that Saddam was seeking uranium.

Another former government official told Wilson that Iran had tried to buy 400 tons of uranium in 1998. That's the same year that Saddam forced the weapons inspectors to leave Iraq. Could the former official have meant Iraq rather than Iran? If someone were to try to connect those dots, what picture might emerge?Schmidt adds that the Senate panel was alarmed to find that the CIA never "fully investigated possible efforts by Iraq to buy uranium from Niger destined for Iraq and stored in a warehouse in Benin."

http://www.nationalreview.com/may/may200407121105.asp

The polls showing large numbers of Americans believing that Saddam Hussein was "directly linked to 9/11" are mostly an example of the limitations of multiple choice polling. (Personally, I believe that a Middle Eastern link to the 2001 anthrax attacks is highly probably.) Most Americans know that Hussein had been a long-term supporter of terrorists, had been a long-term enemy of the United States, and knew that al-Qaeda were terrorists and enemies of the United States. There's easily enough basis for an alliance there. So, let's say you believe that IRaq and al-Qaeda had worked together periodically, say on a chemical weapons factory in the Sudan which Clinton blew up in 1998. Post 9/11, that's enough to justify invading. But that's not a choice on the menu for "direct link to 9/11." So you say that a direct Iraq-9/11 link is "somewhat likely."

Not to mention that the CIA can't find its ass with both hands and a map, so if there were a link, the CIA wouldn't know about it anyway. Best to just take out ALL of our enemies, Godfather style.

World Press. Franken cites a British intelligence conclusion that there was no operational relationship (or something, it was Friday and today is Sunday) and goes through a set of accents for foreign papers. What struck me was that, except for Xinhua newswire, none of them were very prominent foreign papers. So I wasn't nearly as surprised as Franken expected that the only US outlets to pick it up were the Village Voice and LA Weekly.

Libya. Y'know what, I don't care what disgruntled State Department hack Floyd Leverett has to say. Cause this is what Muammar Qadaffi had to say :

A spokesman for Mr Berlusconi said the prime minister had been telephoned
recently by Col Gaddafi of Libya, who said: "I will do whatever the Americans
want, because I saw what happened in Iraq, and I was afraid."

Afraid of the Cowboy, baby. (BTW, Orton should change his theme music to a remix of Kid Rock's Cowboy ASAP.) Memo to Leverett: Dictators will jerk the US State Department around forever if they don't think you're this close to going Manuel Noriega on their ass.

"If America Wavers" W has a point here. A major part of America's problem in the Islamic world is that they think we don't have the balls to fight, bleed and win. They give the litany--in Beirut, we ran. In Somalia, we ran. In Kuwait, we didn't have the courage to go to Baghdad. Dozens of terrorist attacks since the 1970's, and we did next to nothing. Americans are too weak and effeminate to fight and win, too enervated by MTV and material comfort. If Bush doesn't do something about Iran's nuclear program, we're screwed.

Kerry's "Unflagging Support for Our Troops." http://www.richmond.edu/~ebolt/history398/JohnKerryTestimony.html

"Razed villages in a manner reminiscent of Jenghis Khan." How's that for support. It emerged upon investigation that most of the witnesses at the Winter Soldier Investigation, and all of the ones with the best atrocity stories, had not actually been to Vietnam. (Some were using the identities of actual Vietnam veterans, who later denied both the stories and their presence in Detroit.)

Swift Boat press treatment. I'll just say that, with the exception of Kerry's hometown Boston papers, no mainstream media outlet particularly investigated the Swift Boat Vet's charges. Rightwing media did prove one Kerry lie--that he participated in secret missions in Cambodia in 1968. (Folllowing is an Op-Ed from an American Enterprise Institute scholar)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A27211-2004Aug23.html

"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember
what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians,
and have the president of the United States telling the American people that
I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which
is seared -- seared -- in me."
However seared he was, Kerry's spokesmen now say his memory was faulty. When the Swift boat veterans who oppose Kerry presented statements from his commanders and members of his unit denying that his boat entered Cambodia, none of Kerry's shipmates came forward, as they had on other issues, to corroborate his account. Two weeks ago Kerry's spokesmen began to backtrack.

The origins of the Swift Boat Veterans are in Kerry's practice, his entire political career, of playing up his medals and veteran credentials on one hand, and his anti-war activism on the other, with a repeated pattern of, er, "embellishing for dramatic effect." He threw his medals into the REflecting pool, or his ribbons, or someone else's ribbons on their behalf. The upshot was, that when his apolitical war buddies suddenly heard the other side of his mouth, they were PISSED. And so when political operatives came around signing them up for the Swift Boat project, they signed.