The whole osama-saddam link thing was absolutely fascinating to watch on so many levels that it's hard to even know where to begin. The whole thing was just freaking insane. I mean...
Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell and all those other dickheads didn't actually spend much time (if any) saying that Saddam was behind 9-11. At most they'd say that Saddam and Osama had a relationship of some sort (...a terse, brief meeting between iraqi field agents and wahibi wannabe terrorists generally being the extent of the alleged relationship). But the case was all about Saddam and dubya emm dees and liberating the shit out of the iraqis.
on a rational, explicit level at least....
The case for connecting Saddam and Obama was made on an implicit and emotional level, not on a rational and explicit level. It was some darkly genius propaganda, IMO. Everyone believed that Saddam was behind 9-11 ....
....at one point, several years after the fact, something like 60% of the US still thought that Saddam was behind 9-11...I'd bet money that 92bdad still believes this is the case. But insanely large numbers of people nonetheless believed something which a) was silly on it's face; and b) was never alleged by anyone other than crackpot
conspiracy theorists and a handful of hi-vis neocons.
...but I digress...
....everyone believed that Saddam was behind 9-11 even though Bush and Co never said this was the case. Instead of saying that Saddam did it, Bush would start a sentence with Saddam and finish the sentence with planes flying into the World Trade Centers....'saddam is an evil guy, and let us not forget the memory of what evil guys can do when they fly big planes into big buildings' blah blah blah. It wasn't that he said that Saddam masterminded the attacks, but instead he just constantly reinforced an emotional connection between Saddam and 9-11.
darkly genius propaganda....
....So Cheney never had to so much argue that there was a connection as he had to be careful to argue that it was
possible that there was a connection to avoid any cognitive dissonance between the emotional connection between Saddam and Obama and the intellectual absurdity of a connection between the two.
anyhoo...those were crazy times. I kind of miss them, because I think the economic shit from the present administration is far more disturbing (and has more dire long term implications) than anything Bush and his band of miscreaant criminals pulled in the early oughts.