Accidental honesty

Condi Rice has accidentially said something truthful. Too bad she didn't know it at the time.

The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda . . . Or we could take a bolder approach, which is to say we could go after the root causes of the kind of terrorism that was produced there and that meant a different kind of Middle East. And there is no-one who could have imagined a different kind of Middle East with Saddam Husein still in power. . .

Let's rephrase that, shall we? The key phrase is "Or we could. . ." That means "we knew we could have gone after al Qaeda, but we chose not to. We decided instead to attempt regime change in defiance of the UN Security Council, valid intelligence of Iraqi WMD's as well as ongoing WMD inspections, and with no competent planning of what we would do once Hussein was taken out."

Without saying it, Condi is admitting that there was no direct connection between 9/11 and the Iraq War, in spite of the 'mushroom cloud" scare tactics they led with in the runup to the war and stuck with for so many months following. They simply saw the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity to alter the politics of the Middle East. They sure did that, didn't they. . .