Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the rounds of the news shows today and said that in the war on terror the United States has no choice but “to act on the basis of murky intelligence.”

On Fox News, he said, “I think the lesson of 9/11 is that if you’re not prepared to act on the basis of murky intelligence, then you’re going to have to act after the fact, and after the fact now means after horrendous things have happened to this country.”

Do you think Wolfowitz was asked about Afghanistan? Or about attempts to track down Al Qaeda cells in Pakistan? Nope, he was talking about Iraq.

You may have been confused because he kept talking about Sept. 11, when no connection between Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda was ever demonstrated. The intelligence on that subject wasn’t murky — it didn’t exist!

Even a nuclear-armed Iraq wasn’t a plausible threat to the United States unless you believed there was some reason Hussein would cooperate in some kind of handoff of arms to Al Qaeda or another anti-American terrorist organization. That’s why the demonstration of coordination between the two was crucial to the case for war.

Indeed, Wolfowitz and his boss, Donald Rumsfeld, targeted Iraq Sept. 12, 2001, before even any attempts to investigate the (it turns out, nonexistent) relationship between Hussein’s regime and the attacks of the day before.

Not only that. Not only that. They had targeted Iraq years before, urging then-President Clinton to undertake a policy of regime change there in 1997, years before Sept. 11 woke everyone up to the real danger posted by terrorism, back when everyone was harping about “rogue nations” like, oh, Iraq and North Korea.

Meanwhile, the real battle against Al Qaeda is not being fought with the full force it deserves. And we can only hope against hope that the Iraqi reconstruction does not turn into a painful episode with possibly disastrous consequences.

Bullshit, Wolfowitz! I call bullshit on you.

(Also posted to Stand Down.)