Talking Points Memo: Big Picture

By Josh Marshall

Let me return one more time, at least for today, to this issue of who's al Qaeda and who's not. Obviously, at one level it is simply a semantic question. And it can seem like a lot of ink to spill on a point of words and definitions when so much carnage and controversy are unfolding before our eyes. So it is worth stepping back to see just what the big deal is and how it plays into our predicament in Iraq and how we might get our way out.

Beginning in the months just after 9/11 and ever since the president and his deputies have tried to float their foreign policy on the shock, fear and desire for revenge spawned by the 9/11 attacks. The first signs (though these weren't clear in their details at the time) came in the decision to pull troops away from the hunt for bin Laden himself in late 2001 in order to ready them for the assault on Iraq little more than a year later. There we have the kernel of deception which is like the original sin of the Iraq War and, because of that, keeps coming resurfacing again and again. The claim that attacking Iraq was attacking the people who attacked the United States on 9/11, that the two things were related in anything more than a mental figment.