Liberals like to reiterate, again and again, that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. But that isn’t quite accurate. Because of Bush and Cheney’s obsessive desire to tie Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks, the Intelligence Community had to look very, very closely at the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda. And then they had to look again. And then the White House set up the Office of Special Plans to take another look. In the end, they found nothing credible. There was no operational relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda, no evidence that Saddam had foreknowledge or that he helped fund or plan the attacks.

But that isn’t the only way of looking at the question. Iraq may not have worked with al-Qaeda, but Iraq had a lot to do with 9/11. When Usama bin-Laden issued his 1998 fatwa, his first point was this:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples.

Bin-Laden’s opposition to the United States started at a specific moment in time.

After Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, bin Laden offered to help defend Saudi Arabia (with 12,000 armed men) but was rebuffed by the Saudi government. Bin Laden publicly denounced his government’s dependence on the U.S. military and demanded an end to the presence of foreign military bases in the country. According to reports (by the BBC and others), the 1990/91 deployment of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia in connection with the Gulf War upset Muslims because the Saudi government claims legitimacy based on their role as guardians of the sacred Muslim cities of Mecca and Medina. After the Gulf War cease-fire agreement left Saddam Hussein remaining in power in Iraq, the ongoing presence of long-term bases for non-Muslim U.S. forces in Saudi Arabia continued to undermine the Saudi rulers’ perceived legitimacy and inflamed anti-government Islamist militants, including bin Laden.

Going back to bin-Laden’s 1998 fatwa, his second point was also about Iraq.

Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, which has exceeded 1 million… despite all this, the Americans are once against trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

Here bin-laden is referring to the sanctions and the 1998 bombing of the Mukhabarat’s headquarters. And he predicted that the United States’ real aim was to destroy Iraq and render it unable to project force.

Third, if the Americans’ aims behind these wars are religious and economic, the aim is also to serve the Jews’ petty state and divert attention from its occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there. The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel’s survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

And then bin-Laden concluded:

The ruling to kill the Americans and their allies — civilians and military — is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it, in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip, and in order for their armies to move out of all the lands of Islam, defeated and unable to threaten any Muslim.

Seen in this light, Iraq had a lot to do with 9/11. Specifically, it was our decision to green-light Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, followed by our decision to liberate Kuwait using permanent Saudi military bases, followed by protracted sanctions and the no-fly zones, that led to the rise of al-Qaeda. As Bin-Laden noted, our policy vis-a-vis the Israel/Palestine issue was also a contributing factor (albeit, of secondary importance).

But let’s take this a step further. What did bin-Laden expect the United States to do in response to 9/11? Did he expect us to curl up into a little ball and pull all our troops out of the Middle East? I find that doubtful. Bush and Cheney had been quite transparent during their campaign for office in 2000 that they would be looking for an opportunity to take Saddam Hussein out of power. For example, this is from the second debate with Al Gore.

Bush: The coalition against Saddam has fallen apart or it’s unraveling, let’s put it that way. The sanctions are being violated. We don’t know whether he’s developing weapons of mass destruction. He better not be or there’s going to be a consequence should I be the president.

This exchange is from the same debate:

MODERATOR: People watching here tonight are very interested in Middle East policy, and they are so interested they want to base their vote on differences between the two of you as president how you would handle Middle East policy. Is there any difference?

GORE: I haven’t heard a big difference in the last few exchanges.

BUSH: That’s hard to tell. I think that, you know, I would hope to be able to convince people I could handle the Iraqi situation better.

MODERATOR: Saddam Hussein, you mean, get him out of there?

BUSH: I would like to, of course, and I presume this administration would as well. We don’t know — there are no inspectors now in Iraq, the coalition that was in place isn’t as strong as it used to be. He is a danger. We don’t want him fishing in troubled waters in the Middle East. And it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be important to rebuild that coalition to keep the pressure on him.

MODERATOR: You feel that is a failure of the Clinton administration?

BUSH: I do.

And this from Cheney’s debate with Joe Lieberman:

Dick Cheney: I also think it’s unfortunate we find ourselves in a position where we don’t know for sure what might be transpiring inside Iraq. I certainly hope he’s not regenerating that kind of capability, but if he were, if in fact Saddam Hussein were taking steps to try to rebuild nuclear capability or weapons of mass destruction, you would have to give very serious consideration to military action to – to stop that activity. I don’t think you can afford to have a man like Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons in the Middle East.

A careful observer could read between the lines. The Bush/Cheney team then made it even more obvious that they wanted to attack Iraq when they began staffing their administration with a group of neo-conservatives that had been publicly advocating just such a policy. It’s quite likely that Usama bin-Laden expected America’s response to be an attack on Iraq. And I have seen accounts of varying reliability that say just that: that al-Qaeda’s strategy was to draw America into a fight in the Arab world and repeat the job they did on the USSR in Afghanistan.

There’s another possibility. Perhaps the goal was to rupture U.S./Saudi relations, and that is why there were so many Saudis among the hijackers. It certainly looks like someone set up Prince Bandar’s wife by asking her to give money to the San Diego hijackers. Regardless, I think it is implausible that al-Qaeda did not anticipate a military response in the Arab world.

I think that was the plan all along.

So, what did Iraq have to do with 9/11? It was our decision to liberate Kuwait, base our military in Saudi Arabia, and impose a decade long sanctions regime that provided both the main impetus and the moral justification for the ever-more-lethal terrorist attacks of al-Qaeda.

Beyond that, it was our nation’s emotional response to the attacks and the administration’s stoking of our anger and insecurities that provided the neo-conservatives with the climate they needed to sell the war to the public. Without the attacks of 9/11 it is unlikely the Bush administration could have ram-rodded the foreign policy establishment into backing a preemptive war of choice in Iraq. If bin-Laden needed to attack in order to lure us into his trap, the neo-conservatives needed the attack in order to manipulate the public into supporting their preferred policy. It was a lose-lose proposition.

The terrorist attacks of 9/11 did not educate the American people. They made us angry and stupid. And that is the reaction of any nation to terrorist attacks. Some, like Britain and Spain, have learned to deal with attacks with a level head, but they still respond by chipping away at civil liberties.

What does Iraq have to do with 9/11? It has everything to do with it. Without the Persian Gulf War, al-Qaeda would not exist. Without our ongoing presence in Saudi Arabia (used primarily for the southern no-fly zone), bin-Laden would not have attacked. Without the sanctions, a main pillar of recruitment would have been absent. Without the pre-existing desire of neo-conservatives to attack Iraq, it would not have been so easy to predict our response.

Iraq did not have any role in planning or executing 9/11. But Iraq had everything to do with why 9/11 happened.