"On the question of whether or not Iraq was involved in 9/11, there was never any evidence to prove that," Dick Cheney conceded during a Fox News interview earlier this week. The Czech intelligence chatter suggesting a possible meeting between Muhammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence that Cheney had relied upon during several Meet the Press appearances to advance a 9/11-Iraq connection, the former vice president admits, "was never borne out." The claim seemed preposterous back when Cheney touted it on the ancient Sunday morning news program. I took a lot of flak from fellow conservatives for doubting it in my book Intellectual Morons and also on this blog. Like virtually everything else about the Iraq war, I was right and they were wrong. For the sake of American credibility, and at the expense of my own, I wish it had been the other way around.

Many, many times over the recent years have I also wished it had been he other way around. But the facts are not as such.
This is why I cannot accept Cheney as the new voice of the republican party.

It's funny, I never once thought Iraq was involved with 9/11 and while I'm sure there are people who do or did,no one in my immediate circle of friends and acquainences ever used that as an excuse for their support of the war and neither did I.

It always amazes me when people who didn't support the war throw that false connection out as if their refuting a claim that all supporters believed.

"It's not getting better. It's getting worse."
Dan Flynn, blogging about the "surge" on July 17, 2007

Both Dan Flynn and Dick Cheney have been wrong about some of the details concerning the war. Opus is right that this mistake by Cheney was trivial since no serious observer on either side thought the report of a meeting between Atta and Iraqi intelligence was a important consideration in extending the fighting to Iraq.

Many years ago Dan Flynn challenged his readers to postulate what winning in Iraq would look like. I responded that the longer we stayed there the bigger our win would be. We have stayed long enough now that we have had seven and three quarters years without a significant terrorist attack in the United States. We have stayed there long enough that we have seven and three quarters years to develop strategies and technologies to counter terrorist activities. Like many of our great victories of the past, like the Old Line Maryland troops holding the British off on Long Island on 27 August 1776 until the main force of the Continental Army could escape, we won because we held.

Stopping fanatic jihadists required at the time a way to preoccuppy them with a challenge they felt they could and should meet. Iraq was that way to preoccupy them. Osama bin Laden called it the central front in the struggle.

We have held on. We have decisively won the first battle in what will be a long struggle against fanatic jihadists.

DocMcG: You aren't being honest in your parsing of my quote, which was rather crucially prefaced by the words: "Spring was the deadliest three months for Americans in Iraq." In other words, my statement that things were getting worse in Iraq was a factual statement backed up by irrefutable numbers. I think you left that sentence out because you are an arguer and not a truth seeker.

I was opposed to the war myself, and I've always taken comfort from any other conservatives (such as Dan ) who agree with this position.

That said, I have to agree at least partially with opus. When I heard about the 9/11-Iraq connection, it was almost always from opponents of the war who said there was none. In fact, for a short time, I was skeptical about whether or not the administration even made such a claim.

Obviously they did. But it was not essential to their argument.

Again here we go, i never heard anyone in the bush admin. ever say irag was linked to 9-11. dan your seaching for a i told you so moment. and you aint gettin it. the war is a BIG WIN. the naysayer can site this and that but its all for nuttin. do you really think that irag with hussane still in power would be no threat to us? and who is to say he would even still be in charge,hell his wacko sons might have taken over. the fact is we went on the attack and the ragheads have been beat'n everytime. afganistan was a quick win, i know there still fighting going on but we couldnt chase'm in pakistan could we?

Dan Flynn,

Casualties were worse in the spring of 07 (as supporters of the surge predicted they would be) but as you wrote in July things were getting better and turning around. You couldn't know that; just as Cheney couldn't know the reports he had about the meeting were wrong (or the information he had earlier relied on from the CIA and intelligence agencies around the world about the presence of specific weapons were wrong). But just as he jumped at information that supported his view, you incorrectly extrapolated from the spring data to the situation in July.

Cheney has admitted his mistake; I have not seen you acknowledge that your obvious skepticism about the surge (a skepticism that was clearly present in the July 17 post and that I accurately reflected with the quote I took from it) was mistaken.

It actually got marginally worse for the U.S. death count in Iraq the month after I wrote those words. The surge didn't coincide with a real reduction in the U.S. death count until that fall. The numbers were absolutely atrocious from around 9/6 to about 9/7 and then went down considerably.

Had I made a prediction--said "things WILL get worse" instead of "it's getting worse"--you might have a point. Had I made my statement in December of '07 instead of July of '07, you might have a point. My statement was accurate: things were going horribly for the U.S. in Iraq in the spring and summer of '07. I observed a fact--which you left out of your parsed quote to further your argument at the expense of your intellectual honesty. Here is what I wrote, including the crucial first sentence that you omitted to strip the statement of context in the furtherance of your argument: "Spring was the deadliest three months for Americans in Iraq. It's not getting better. It's getting worse." That's a factual statement that isn't contradicted by the fact that several months later things did improve.

Incidentally, the surge did produce better results than I had expected, and I said so on this site several times, including here....

http://www.flynnfiles.com/archives/world_events2008/iraq_improvement.html

Of course, there is a great difference between skepticm of future results and delusion about matters in the past tense. For instance, I thought the Patriots would beat the Giants in the 2008 Super Bowl. I was wrong. But what if on the day after the Super Bowl, I had insisted that the Patriots really had won. This second scenario is the one that too many war supporters fall into on Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, Niger-yellowcake, and Muhammed Atta-Iraqi intelligence connection--all disowned by the past administration that once furthered them but still defended by party men who aren't grown-up enough to admit their mistakes.

Dan,
Who, exactly, is going around defending an Iraq/9/11 connection?

As someone else pointed out, the only time I've heard it brought up is by people who didn't support the war and making it sound like everyone who did, do believe there was a connection.

So please, who are all these people who are making the connection today?

Why do I have to name "all these people who are making the connection today" when the post refers to one very powerful man making insinuations several years ago?

Here's what Cheney said on Meet the Press in 2001:

"it's been pretty well confirmed that [al Qaeda terrorist Mohammed Atta] did go to Prague and he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi intelligence in Czechoslovakia last April, several months before the [9/11] attack."

Here's what he said the following year: "We have reporting that places [Atta] in Prague with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer a few months before the attacks on the World Trade Center."

Cheney, as he now admits, was wrong. It wasn't "pretty well confirmed." And by the time he made the second proclamation on national television, his own intelligence said they couldn't in any way substantiate the meeting and the Czech intelligence who had initially reported the second-hand information had disowned it.

"....all disowned by the past administration that once furthered them but still defended by party men who aren't grown-up enough to admit their mistakes."

If you're going to contend that there are people who are still supporting the position, beyond Cheney and the administration, you should be prepared to name them.