Here's the 1998 letter the neocons sent to Clinton
Unless you believe they were trying to deceive Clinton I would say Lind is full of s**t.
As for a connection between bin Laden and Saddam, nobody would have made an issue of it at that time...Lind is again being disingenuous.
In my opinion, that is the key passage in the 1998 letter, and what this war is about. Yes, it's about Israel too, and about the "moderate" Arab states, and about liberating the Iraqi people, but even all of these reasons taken together would not have sent one US Marine to Iraq.
However, a nuclear conflagration in the Middle East was an unacceptably high risk if Saddam had been allowed to continue his WMD programs. Modern industrialized nations cannot live without oil. It's about our own survival, pure and simple.
The Salon article is just anti-Semitic garbage. Maybe it will earn them another "bridge loan" from an "unnamed" (i.e., Saudi) investor, but no amount of artificial life support can hide the fact that Salon is finished, kaput, dead.