Bush: "Saddam done broke the twin towers". posted by Richard Seymour

Okay, he didn't say that, but he said this :

We went to war because we were attacked, and we are at war today because there are still people out there who want to harm our country and hurt our citizens.

Bush's popularity rating slid recently below the 50% mark, hitting a low of 41% last week, when a majority of Americans expressed a desire for troops to be withdrawn from Iraq. What Bush's advisers will have noticed is that among those who still supported the venture, most believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the conflagrations in Manhattan and Washington DC. Maximising the hold of that illusion is obviously the means settled on of restoring Bush's ratings.

Bush went on to say:

Some may disagree with my decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, but all of us can agree that the world's terrorists have now made Iraq a central front in the war on terror ...

These foreign terrorists violently oppose the rise of a free and democratic Iraq, because they know that when we replace despair and hatred with liberty and hope, they lose their recruiting grounds for terror.

I like that phrase "the world's terrorists". It suggests a shadowy community of evil-doers who congregate in some underground conference chamber, have votes on where to focus their efforts and delegate various responsibilities while nurturing oil-black beards between finger and thumb. The strategy of 'ex post facto' justification for an imperial misadventure is not new. When Nato sent the boys over to fry Serbia, the ensuing exacerbation of refugee expulsions was used as the justification for war. Now, because the war has had the consequence of drawing a number of Wahabbi fighters into Iraq simultaneously with the emergence of a national resistance movement, this is suddenly a good reason for having killed 100,000+ people. It's a beautiful cover, if anyone buys it. You can justify practically anything in this way, and indeed I intend to.