I?m not going to try to do justice to the escalating controversy this week about what the 9/11 commission said on the Saddam-terrorist connection and the forceful response from the Bush administration and from well-informed private analysts. You’re welcome to read and make up your own mind.
What did leap out at me was the value of my experience as a high-school and college debater. Some of the aspects of tournament debate are absurd ? such as the tendency towards motormouth-ness so as to avoid ?dropping? an argument, a tendency exacerbated by the use of coaches or former debaters as judges rather than audiences or judges outside the debating world. But at least with formal debate, managed on flow charts, you do learn to spot contradictions and see the consequences of ignoring those dropped arguments.
Remember, for example, the widespread assertion ? often accompanied by insults and derision aimed at the Bush administration ? that Osama bin Laden would never have countenanced a working relationship with the Ba?ath regime in Iraq? OBL was said to be a sworn enemy of the secular Saddam Hussein, thus it would have been unthinkable for him to set aside his fundamentalist zeal and work with Iraq against common enemies such as the Saudis and the U.S.
But the 9/11 commission did conclude that OBL and al Qaeda sought operational ties with Iraq. What they suggest is that Iraq failed to respond, that it rebuffed al Qaeda. I don?t happen to believe that is true, but at the very least it shows that the many so-called ?experts? on al Qaeda didn?t have the foggiest notion of what they were talking about. Supporters of Bush and the war are making a mistake by not highlighting this point, as credibility is critically important in the debate over inherently shadowy activities and inherently incomplete intelligence. If you have such blinders on that you can?t imagine unlikely allies of convenience in world affairs, you don?t know much history and you have no business being taken seriously.
