Derbyshire Award Nominee

This can't go over well with his colleagues on the Corner:

Second-lamest line (I am working here from Cheney's appearance on MTP yesterday): the one about how SH was so involved in terrorism, because he was paying money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. This is deeply unconvincing. Any secular-Arab dictator looking to do a little triangulation with the religious elements in his population & neighborhood would have done the same. And these folk were blowing themselves up in Israel, not the U.S.A. I don't approve of suicide bombers, in Israel or anywhere else, but to advance this as evidence that SH was hunkered down in conference with people planning attacks on the U.S.A. is, again, lame.

It's worth saying that, pre-war at least, this business about the suicide bombers was a kind of double-pronged ridiculously. On the one hand, we were supposed to believe that Saddam's bucks for martyrs was indication of a looming Baath/Qaeda terror threat against the United States. On the other hand, we were supposed to believe that Saddam's financial support was the key driver of Palestinian terrorism and that Palestinian terrorism was, in turn, the sole driver of the Arab-Israeli conflict. No more Saddam, and the whole problem would just go away. The road to Jerusalem runs through Baghdad. Absurd. Just absolutely ignorant and absurd. And yet this kind of thinking has been the official basis of national policy for five years and will continue to be for years to come.