Quote:
Originally posted by sgtclub
There are and were plenty of connections between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Whether they jusified war is a separate question ...
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Quality and not quantity is certainly the question, yes.
At the risk of being blogified*, I thought that
Matt Yglasias made this point pretty well.
Quote:
As long as Iraq/Qaeda stuff is out there, it's important to note how little the fact that a meeting occurred tells us unless we know what's said. Peter Bergen has met with bin Laden himself and now works as an analyst at CNN and a fellow at the New America Foundation, neither of Bergen's employers, however, are in league with bin Laden. Rather, the meeting was an interview, part of what helped Bergen establish his reputation as a leading analyst and journalist on terrorism issues. People who work on the Hill have meetings with lobbyists and interest groups all the time, sometimes this means Senator X is really a pawn of Industry Y, but sometimes it means that Senator X needs to tell Industry Y that he can't help them out and wants to do it in a respectful way. When Adrianna was meeting with the FBI, that did mean she was in league with the Feds, but it didn't mean that the Soprano family was. Tony met with Johnny Sack a whole bunch of times, sometimes to conspire with him, sometimes to tell him to fuck off. Neville Chamberlain was pursuing an unwise policy during his meetings with Hitler in Munich, but he wasn't in cahoots with Hitler. Don Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein in the 80s to collaborate on their common interest in checking Iranian power, but that doesn't mean they were working together in 2003 or 1991.
All of which is just to say that evidence of meetings isn't really evidence of anything. Now if two people meet every Monday morning over a period of years, it seems safe to conclude that they're hatching some kind of scheme, but it still doesn't tell you much about the nature of the scheme or who's working for whom. But scattered contacts? A handshake here, a nod of the head there? That's just life. People have meetings. Give me a dozen years and I'll have met tens of thousands of people vaguely involved in politics and government but we're not all in league with each other.
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It's things like this that make me roll my eyes when the Safires of the world scream "But there was a meeeeting! Important nods were made, winks exchanged!" The man is jonesing so hard for this connection to exist that he'd mainline the stuff if he could.
Gattigap
*It's not pretty. Ty "showed his scars" at Cafe Mars the other night, and I swear to God, it cleared the place out in seconds. We're not invited back, and I already miss the martinis. Sniff.
