Last Wednesday, President George W Bush admitted that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any role in the Sept 11 terrorist attacks on the United States.

In a television interview the day before, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said: "We have never claimed that Saddam Hussein had either direction or control of 9/11."

Despite these statements by members of the Bush administration, according to a recent poll, some 70 percent of Americans believe that Saddam was personally involved with the terrorist attacks of that day.

It is obvious why the American people believe this to be true: While there is clearly no serious evidence linking Saddam to the Sept 11 hijacking, members of the Bush administration consistently justified their invasion of Iraq over the past two years by implying a connection between the two.

Bush himself frequently made statements linking Saddam and Sept 11 by placing the two, previously separate issues within the same context during speeches advocating an invasion of Iraq.

For example, Bush argued on Oct 7 last year: "We've learned that Iraq has trained al-Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gases. And we know that after Sept 11, Saddam Hussein's regime gleefully celebrated the terrorist attacks on America."

On May1 this year, Bush warned: "The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on Sept 11, 2001 - and still goes on."

And as recent as last week, Vice-President Dick Cheney claimed: "If we're successful in Iraq then we will have struck a major blow right at the heart of the base, if you will, the geographic base of the terrorists who have had us under assault now for many years, but most especially on 9/11."

Disarming critics

By not making concrete statements connecting Saddam and the Sept 11 attacks, the Bush administration was able to avoid explicitly lying to the American people - while at the same time achieving their objectives of getting support for an US intervention in Iraq by putting Saddam's government into the same political and military context as the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.

From this perspective, the recent comments made by administration officials denying that they've ever tried to connect Saddam and Sept 11 are being made in order to disarm critics who charge that the administration mislead the American people into supporting the war in Iraq.

Washington's desire to overthrow the leadership in Iraq has been evident since the Gulf War in 1991. However, due to the risks and costs involved in removing a foreign government - such costs that are evident now as the US struggles to maintain order in Iraq - the first Bush administration decided against such a radical foreign policy objective and instead decided to slowly weaken Iraq through economic sanctions.

The Clinton administration continued this policy by unwaveringly maintaining the sanctions regime. Despite this, there was a group of politicians and academics constantly lobbying to have the Ba'ath party removed from power through military force.

New Pearl Harbour

These individuals - known as the neo-conservatives and mostly working within the American Enterprise Institute and its underling, the Project for the New American Century - managed to achieve much influence and clout with the election of the Bush administration and hoped to present their radical foreign policy objectives of removing the Ba'ath party along with 'reshaping' the Middle East in a manner that would better serve US interests.

However, these individuals failed to put this policy into effect during the first nine months of 2001, as the political bureaucracy in Washington is traditionally hesitant about taking drastic foreign policy actions that could result in great risks and costs to American interests.

Indeed, members of the Bush administration who were part of the neo-conservative camp - such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and Undersecretary of State for Disarmament John Bolton - were aware of this difficulty in pursuing their broad, strategic foreign policy plans; in a report before the 2000 elections, the Project for the New American Century said it would be difficult to realise their objectives - one being the removal of Saddam - without "some catastrophic and catalysing event, like a new Pearl Harbor."

With the Sept 11 attacks, and the widespread fear in not only Washington but throughout the entire United States, the Bush administration knew they could use the attacks and the emotional maelstrom they created to their advantage. By insinuating that Saddam was somehow involved in the attack, the Bush administration successfully made their case for removing the leadership in Baghdad.

This chain of events highlights the difficulty that governments practicing democratic ideals have in achieving foreign policy objectives, especially moralist democracies like the United States.

While non-democratic governments are able to implement radical foreign policy plans as long as they can prevent their people from rebelling - usually through the use of physical repression - democratic governments are held accountable by their voting population.

Therefore, instead of publicly explaining foreign policy objectives and decisions, democratic leaders often find themselves having to mask their pursuit of national interests and power politics with moral explanations. This is most evident in recent US politics, from the fight against the 'evil empire' in the Soviet Union, stopping a 'butcher' in Yugoslavia, to hunting down 'evildoers' all over the world.

Nuclear weapons

The fear of Iraq developing weapons of mass destruction to be used against the US was also used by the Bush administration to shore up support for an intervention in Iraq. On Oct 7, 2002, Bush stated in a speech in Ohio:

"The Iraqi regime ... possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons. It is seeking nuclear weapons. Satellite photographs reveal that Iraq is rebuilding facilities at sites that have been part of its nuclear programme in the past."

In another statement from October, Bush said that Iraq "is reconstituting its nuclear weapons programme. Saddam has held numerous meetings with Iraqi nuclear scientists, a group he calls his 'nuclear mujahideen' his nuclear holy warriors"

On March 30 this year, Rumsfeld claimed that he knew where Iraq's weapons of mass destruction were located, asserting, "We know where they are. They're in the area around Tikrit and Baghdad and east, west, south and north somewhat."

Yet now he has retreated from pre-war claims that Iraq had massive stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction. Now that weapons of mass destruction have not been found, Rumsfeld said: "Sometimes I overstate for emphasis. I should have said, 'I believe they're in that area. Our intelligence tells us they're in that area, and that was our best judgment.'"

Like Bush, Cheney argued three days before the invasion of Iraq that Saddam had "reconstituted nuclear weapons." Yet when this turned out to be a clear falsity, Cheney later said: "I misspoke. We never had evidence that [Saddam] had acquired a nuclear weapon."

Instead, Cheney is now saying that Saddam only had "aspirations to acquire a nuclear weapon."

Despite all of the previous claims by administration officials regarding Saddam's "reconstituted" nuclear weapons programme, somehow Rumsfeld said in June this year: "I don't know anybody in any government or any intelligence agency who suggested that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons."

'Moral logic'

Finally, in addition to insinuating that Saddam was involved in the Sept 11 attacks and that Saddam also either had or was developing nuclear weapons, the Bush administration has tried to argue that individual Iraqis are not fighting against the US occupation in Iraq, but instead resistance is only from former members of Saddam's regime, al-Qaeda and foreign fighters infiltrating Iraq.

For example in June, Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee: "I think these people [attacking coalition forces] are the last remnants of a dying cause."

He said US forces "have the sympathy of the population, not the surviving elements of the Ba'athist regime."

Following this trend, last week Wolfowitz claimed that "a great many of (Osama) bin Laden's key lieutenants are now trying to organise in cooperation with old loyalists from the Saddam regime to attack in Iraq." When questioned about this claim, he said: "It's not 'a great many' - it's one.'"

Furthermore, this comes shortly before the commander of the US-led coalition in Iraq, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, told London's The Times that ordinary Iraqis are also resisting the US occupation.

In response to complaints about persistent civilian casualties in Iraq and cases of US soldiers dealing heavy handedly with Iraqi civilians, Sanchez conceded: "We have seen that when we have an incident in the conduct of our operations, when we killed an innocent civilian, based on their ethic, their values, their culture, they would seek revenge."

The Bush administration has consistently framed their foreign policy objectives in ways in which they will receive support from the American people, through the use of 'moral logic' and a virtual demagoguery of sorts expressed in its preoccupation with security.

Only a small percentage of Americans would still find palatable the US ' foreign policy objectives if expressed in the terms power politics, economic interests, and realpolitik.

Report drafted by: Erich Marquardt

The Power and Interest News Report (PINR) is an analysis-based publication that seeks to, as objectively as possible, provide insight into various conflicts, regions and points of interest around the globe.