Iraq : the Root Causes of Terrorism?

For Condoleezza Rice to say this on NBC’s Meet the Press....

The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda […] or we could take a bolder approach which is to say we had to go after the root causes of the kind of terrorism that was produced there, and that meant a different kind of Middle-East. And there is no one who could have imagined a different king of Middle-East with Saddam Hussein still in power.

…. takes balls!
Now this is really a fascinating spin, isn’t it? Given that it is al Qaeda that attacked America on 9/11 and that Bin Laden is still on the loose, and given that Saddam Hussein, as bad and cruel as he was, had nothing to do with the attack, it is amazing that Mrs Rice is still trying to implicitly connect the two.
More than that, it seems rather odd that someone – as intelligent as Dr Rice - could imagine a different Middle-East without a major change between the Palestinians and the Israeli, or without a change of leadership in Saudi Arabia (the funding state of Islamic fundamentalism and the obvious ideological “root cause of terrorism”). I’m not suggesting that we should have invaded the Saudis – that was clearly a definite no-no - but so much crap from the Secretary of State is almost an insult to our intelligence isn’t it?

PS: By the way, aren't we all forgetting that the rationale for going to war was the "clear and imminent danger" posed by the "weapons of mass destructions" that Saddam Hussein was said to possess? So I guess this statement by Mrs Rice is a way of acknowledging that that was not the reason... It was rather geopolitical motivation that led this administration to make war. Definitely a new and bolder view of casus belli which the Americans would have certainly not supported.