Is Podhoretz On Crack?

A blogger with some knowledge of history wants to know. His evidence? This CSPAN transcript:

Podhoretz: There were 18 reasons to invade Iraq.

Pena: But not connected to 9/11.

Podhoretz: Well, yeah,

Pena: Because he didn’t attack us on 9/11.

Podhoretz: I know.

Pena: Al Qaeda attacked us. Saddam wasn’t a known supporter of Al Qaeda.

Podhoretz: Hitler didn’t attack us at Pearl Harbor, the Japanese did and we went to war against.

Pena: Well they were allied, they were part of an actual Axis alliance.

Podhoretz: Well, yeah, but not a very friendly one and what we did when people say how come we went to Iraq, well what we did when we went to war after Pearl Harbor was go to North Africa. We didn’t go to Japan or uh we took on, we took on the Africa Corps, Hitler’s elite force in Africa.

Pena: But again, Germany and Japan were aligned, clearly part of an alliance that was aligned against us, that was a direct connection. I’m having a hard time making any connection quite frankly between Saddam Hussein’s regime and……….. That was Al-Qaeda as an organization, who attacked us on 9/11…….We haven’t even gotten Bin Laden….We seem to have taken our eye off of the ball and given Bin Laden a pass. For all of the evil that Saddam represents isn’t Bin Laden a greater evil that we should be paying attention to.

Podhoretz: Well, it would be very good to get him and I suspect we will get him before long, the point is not Bin Laden as an individual was the guy to go after, what we were confronted with was a large totalitarianism force, call it Islamo-facism, we were not going after an organization called Al-Qaeda, Al Qaeda was one element of that force….It's as if they say Al-Qaeda hit us, we hit them back and that's the end of it.