I know you fault the White House PR, but they ARE fighting a war and when they say something and it is ignored, I don't know what they can do. PLUS, a lot of this has to do with security. For example, (speculating here) if the strategy was to make flypaper for Al Qaeda in Iraq, they wouldn't talk about AQ, instead letting the happy press fiction of an insurgency and civil war lull the terrorists into thinking they weren't known. Now a whole bunch of them have been killed, including Zarqawi, and the news is leaking out.
I don't know for sure, of course. I just think that the President isn't stupid, and when people have been lying he has a better reason to keep his mouth shut than ignorance of PR. (Although I will freely admit that I am relieved that Scott McClellan is gone and Tony Snow has taken over.)
Which reminds me about something else. We know that Tony knows what he is doing...so how come HE, when asked about this, demurred and said that they couldn't be sure of the information yet? Surely Tony knows the value of this information!
That caught my attention on Fox News Sunday too, when Tony refused to get drawn into a WMD question by Chris Wallace.
I remember when Gen. Hayden underwent his confirmation hearings for CIA Director a few weeks ago. He was asked by some snarling leftist whether he thought the connections between Iraq/AQ were overblown by Steven Hadley. Hayden said the information didn't stand up to scrutiny and there wasn't much of a relationship there. If he really believes this, he doesn't deserve to be the director of the CIA. And if, for national security reasons he doesn't want the jihadists to know what we know about that long-standing relationship, he should have declined to answer in open session.
It has been shown to be an even more substantial relationship since the documents were translated by freeper jveritas, so since we're all talking about the relationship in the blogosphere and there are books about it, I'm not sure what the president gains by keeping it quiet.
Now, it's entirely possible that there is a good reason to not let the public know just how correct the administration was. But then why did the president use this to justify the war to begin with?
I'm not a strategist; far from it. And you know I fully support the administration; it's just their PR campaign since Karen Hughes left has not been terribly good. I think Karen had very good instincts about what resonated with the average American and what battles were important to fight and which weren't worth the trouble.
My two cents.
And I meant to mention, too, that you're correct the president never said Saddam was responsible or even linked to 9/11. What he did say is that we were going to war with Iraq because of WMD and because of Saddam's support and harboring Al Qaeda.