THE PHANTOM CONSEQUENCE OF THE PHANTOM LINK

The meeting of a 9/11 bomber with an Iraqi agent, has for all intents and purposes been discredited. This now "phantom link" between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein is being trumpeted as somehow significant in the assessment of whether or not to go to war against Iraq. In reality, the disproval of the meeting is of absolutely no consequence. The real connection between 9/11 and Saddam Hussein is that 9/11 exposed the drastic flaws that had engulfed American foreign policy since the cold war: its emphasis on multilateralism, its passivity, and its treatment of foreign policy as an extension of domestic economic policy. These mistakes were made both by the first Bush administration and the Clinton administration. Thus, Bush managed to pull defeat from the jaws of victory at the end of the Gulf War, and Clinton exacerbated the problem by conducting an Iraq policy dominated by inertia. 9/11 reestablished the need for proactive, unilateral American military action, as well as the need to at times sublimate economic and trade interests to the needs of American security and principles. Under this new understanding of America's foreign policy priorities, we could no longer simply allow tryants such as Hussein play with the development of weapons of mass destruction. The swamp must be drained, and the place to start is with Iraq - which could once more become the center of a flourishing Arab world, as opposed to the center of the decayed violent husk that it is today.