Coming soon to a debate near you II

Tristero notes a resurgence of the theory that Saddam Hussein worked closely with Al Qaeda and was even involved in the attacks on 9/11. The attempt to push this back into the public eye seems to be timed to coincide with the release of a new book by Stephen Hayes on the subject. You may recall that Hayes made some waves last November with a story in the Weekly Standard that was supposed to present new evidence of links between Saddam and bin Laden's organization.

It turned out that Hayes' story was based on a leaked memo written by Douglas Feith for presentation to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. The memo was a collection of odd bits of intelligence, much of it raw and unsubstantiated. Bear in mind that Feith was responsible for the Office of Special Plans, the rogue "intelligence agency" set up in the White House for the sole purpose of justifying the invasion. There was nothing much that was new in the memo and the intelligence community had already reviewed most of what it contained and felt it proved nothing. Shortly after Hayes' story was published, the Department of Defense issued a terse statement saying, in the kind of bureaucratize in which the DOD specializes, pay no attention to this.

In an article at NRO, Andrew McCarthy jumps on the bandwagon and it's this piece in particular that Tristero takes apart. Much of the action centres on the alleged meeting between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague and it provides a perfect example of what you can expect to see. Read Tristero's post if you want all the gory details but the short version is this:

The supporters of the case for a connection between Saddam and 9/11 will put together a few cherry-picked facts combined with some supposition and a whole pile of circumstantial evidence. Then they'll mix it up with some rhetoric designed to put the burden on the theory's critics to prove that it's not true.

It doesn't work that way. There are thousands of dead and thousands more wounded because of the invasion of Iraq. To justify that, the burden of proof is on those who would make the claims. And the bar should be set high. McCarthy disputes this, suggesting that because National Security is involved (and I wouldn't do his tone justice if I didn't capitalize the words), a lower standard of proof is required here than would be the case in a court of law, as if a lower standard of proof can be used to justify a bloody war and its bloody aftermath than would be required to send a single man to jail.

I can't prove that there were, in fact, no connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. But I don't have to. Full scale invasion was never the only option for dealing with Iraq and it was never enough to prove that Iraq was a threat, which at this point seems less and less likely. It was always necessary to prove that Iraq represented the most serious danger out there, that the threat was serious enough to justify the blood and treasure that has been expended in the last year and that war was the only option available for dealing with that threat. The burden of proof for all of those points is on those who would still try and justify this war.