"The case for overthrowing Saddam was unimpeachable. Why, then, is the administration tongue-tied?" Thus the Murdoch-owned September 5/12 Weekly Standard. If the Standard's editors can't figure out the answer, let me help them. The Bush Administration is tongue-tied because it doesn't know what lie to put out next. The Weekly Standard whistles up its Condé Nast scrivener, Christopher Hitchens, to try to make the arguments the White House can't come up with. He offers us ten points in favor of the war. Let me deal with them one by one.

"(1) The overthrow of Talibanism and Baathism, and the exposure of many highly suggestive links between the two elements of this Hitler-Stalin pact. Abu Musab al Zarqawi, who moved from Afghanistan to Iraq before the coalition intervention, has even gone to the trouble of naming his organization al Qaeda in Mesopotamia."

Few theories have been so generally discredited over the past two years as the supposed connection between the Taliban and the Baath Party in Iraq before the war in 2003. One of the supposed links--publicized by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Yorker--was an Iranian Kurdish drug smuggler held in prison in Iraqi Kurdistan who claimed to have met bin Laden in Kandahar, in Afghanistan, and senior Baathists in Iraq. Before the war began, the smuggler had long been exposed as a liar. On Zarqawi Hitchens is all over the map. For example, Zarqawi was famously at odds with bin Laden in Afghanistan.

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