CNN Team Upset by Bush Tying 9/11 to Iraq, Gergen "Offended"

The CNN analysis team, after President Bush' national address Tuesday night from Ft. Bragg, seemed obsessed about Bush tying September 11th to the war in Iraq. Wolf Blitzer fretted: "We heard a lot of explanations of the connections to 9/11, the new world after 9/11. We heard no reference to the major argument that he made going into the war: weapons of mass destruction." David Gergen falsely asserted that Bush "never once called them 'Iraqi insurgents,' as the media does. He called them terrorists, you know, as if they're all associated and linked to the attacks here on 9/11." When Zahn asked if Bush "overreached with these multiple references to 9/11 when there has been absolutely no linkage established between the actions of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein on that horrible day?", Gergen said he was "offended by the regularity of coming back to 9/11" because "none of the terrorists were linked to Saddam, and, you know, there's been this myth for a long time that's just untrue that Saddam was somehow responsible for 9/11." But that wasn't Bush's point. He was just putting Iraq into the context of world threats post 9/11. On ABC, George Stephanopoulos also questioned Bush's linking of 9/11.