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Hang on, Bush — you've got the wrong man!

He didn't do it. There is no good evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything whatsoever to do with the attacks of two years ago. None. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Nichts.

Now, I'm sure this is something of which all you hyper-informed Princetonians were already well aware. You're probably annoyed with me for even bothering to repeat it. Yet seven out of ten Americans still believe that the still unaccounted-for dictator of Iraq was responsible for 9/11. That's about 175 million people who have no idea who is really responsible for the most horrific attack on our nation in its entire history.

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It's as if most Americans in the forties thought that it was the Australians who really bombed Pearl Harbor, and so many troops were busy occupying New South Wales that Tojo was free to slip off into Manchuria.

This is no accident. The Bush administration has long known that there was no publicly justifiable reason for its war of aggression on Iraq. So they lied about weapons of mass destruction. And, what's worse, they defamed the memory of the thousands killed two years ago with a deliberate pattern of misleading rhetoric which left most Americans unaware who the real killers are.

At a murder trial, the family of the victim is often gunning for a guilty verdict. They say that they want to see justice done for their dearly departed, and want to see the accused pay for his crimes. I've never quite understood this attitude. The whole point of a trial is to determine whether the defendant actually did what he's accused of doing. If the wrong guy is punished, then justice isn't done for the victim, since the real criminal is still at large.

But there is a sort of blind vengeance, a kind of irrational fury, which just wants to see someone punished, to see anyone punished, for the wrongs that one has suffered. While few will admit to this sort of feeling, those in the Bush administration have realized how much easier it is to satisfy than a real desire for justice, which actually requires finding and capturing the guilty parties.

Those slippery folks at Al Qaeda are such a pain to track down, and going after their backers in Saudi Arabia might create problems for the Houston-Washington-Riyadh axis of oil. But Iraq was a sitting duck, led by a TV-ready mustachioed villain who had already proved himself to be a pretty terrible guy. Why not channel Americans' righteous anger for the attacks of Sept. 11 away from its appropriate object and onto a much easier target? It worked for Bush before his war on Iraq, and he's trying it again now to justify an occupation of the country which is proving to be nasty, brutish and long.

So here we are, two years after the towers fell, and the mastermind behind the attacks is still churning out Peshawar's Funniest Home Videos, beaming them across the Arab world and stirring up new attacks. Oh, and that other dude, the one with the moustache, the one who had nothing to do with Sept. 11, he's still at large as well. In other words, Rumsfeld and company aren't merely unable to bring the real terrorists to justice; they can't even bring the fake terrorists to justice. But, hey, if you can fool 70 percent of the people this time, maybe you can fool 60 percent of the people next time. And unlike Iraq, France really does have weapons of mass destruction.

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Mike Frazer is a politics graduate student from Riverdale, N.Y.

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