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...and does a pretty good job.:
Out of this thin gruel, [Stephen] Hayes attempted to make a meal in the Standard’s pages this week. He lifted as many bullet points from the report as he could that, out of context, seemed to bolster his theory. He then went about attacking reporters who accurately wrote that the study found no direct connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda. Hayes tacitly promised his readers that history will ultimately vindicate him, writing that "as much as we have learned from this impressive collection of documents, it is only a fraction of what we will know in 10, 20 or 50 years." And he expressed puzzlement that an administration with an obvious credibility problem had not "done anything to promote the study."Ah, the treasured "I'll be vindicated by my children's children" strategy; last refuge of the false prophet, but who cares because we'll all be dead anyway. Ackerman also takes on Jeff Goldberg, who like Hayes is relying on the likelihood that none of his readers will bother studying the report on connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq:
What he’s hoping you’re too half-awake to realize is that there’s a difference between generic "terror" groups and Al Qaeda. The report, as I wrote in my piece, does not say, at all, contra to Goldberg’s misleading implication, that Saddam collaborated with Ayman Zawahiri. It says that around 1993, a memo from one of Saddam’s apparatchiks noted, "In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt." Years later, that organization would merge with Al Qaeda. Nowhere in the report does Joint Forces Command substantiate that Saddam and Zawahiri’s group actually, you know, did anything together."The goalpost are being moved" is becoming a trite phrase, but it's too accurate not to use here. These men sold us on connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein; having failed to demonstrate any, even after the uncovering of the Iraqi archives and the interrogation of multiple members of the Hussein government and of Al Qaeda, they are left with innuendo about shadowy connections between Hussein and terrorists groups that were, notably, not Al Qaeda. It's too much to ask that the Weekly Standard will ever disavow or even stop publishing Stephen Hayes, but we could at least hope that The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Slate would refrain from giving Goldberg the opportunity to spout such nonsense. --Robert Farley
