Of last night’s speech by Dubya, Andrew Sullivan writes:

I also liked the way the president unapologetically linked what we are doing in Iraq with the broader war on terror. Critics like to believe that Saddam was somehow utterly unconnected to broader terror, had no potential to enable it, and was too secular to cooperate with al Qaeda. They’re wrong on all counts. In the wake of 9/11, a Saddam-Zarqawi alliance would have been a terrible threat.

Notice the misdirection play, there? Of course a Saddam-Zarqawi alliance would have been a terrible threat, but the key phrase there is “would have been.” There was no such alliance, and on that the war critics are absolutely right to say Hussein was “utterly unconnected to broader terror.” Sullivan’s essentially saying: if the facts were different, the critics would be wrong. But the facts are what they are, and he and his ilk are the ones in error.

Instead of a hypothetical threat, now we have a real disaster.

(Also posted to Stand Down).