Turnabout
By Callimachus | Related entries in Dumb Things Said By Smart People, Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On TerrorismMarc Schulman is one of my blogfriends who is keeping an eye on the work of Stephen Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn, patiently piecing together the evidence for a connection between Saddam and al Qaida. Here he quotes Claudia Rosett (of Oil-for-Food fame):
Since the fall of Saddam, the U.S. has had extraordinary access to documents of the former Baathist regime, and is still sifting through millions of them. Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn take some of what is already available, combined with other reports, documentation and details, some from before the overthrow of Saddam, some after. For page after page, they list connections–with names, dates and details such as the longstanding relationship between Osama bin Laden’s top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and Saddam’s regime.
Messrs. Hayes and Joscelyn raise, with good reason, the question of why Saddam gave haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, one of the men who in 1993 helped make the bomb that ripped through the parking garage of the World Trade Center. They detail a contact between Iraqi intelligence and several of the Sept. 11 hijackers in Malaysia, the year before al Qaeda destroyed the twin towers. They recount the intersection of Iraqi and al Qaeda business interests in Sudan, via, among other things, an Oil for Food contract negotiated by Saddam’s regime with the al-Shifa facility that President Clinton targeted for a missile attack following the African embassy bombings because of its apparent connection to al Qaeda. And there is plenty more.
He also notes the different treatment meted out to certain claims depending on their sources.
After word that a US prisoner has complained that he’s been tortured reaches the media, it’s assumed to be true unless and until proven otherwise. When information suggestive of a “pre-existing” relationship between Saddam’s Iraq and al-Qaeda surfaces, the media either ignores it or calls upon an “expert” — like Benjamin — to debunk it. Playing up torture makes the Bush administration and, more importantly, the US look bad. Playing down possible links between state-full and state-less terrorism has the same effects.
What to make of all this? An Iraq-9/11 connection never was a support beam in my decision to support the overthrow of Saddam. It’s impossible to prove a negative, but I thought the evidence put forward for it was fragile. A potential Saddam-Osama partnership was far more worrisome to me, but that was one among many worries at the time.
So, having backed the war without believing in a connection, I’ve given up the right to gloat should one be established. Gloating would be cheap, in that case. Just like it would be cheap for all those people who thought Saddam had WMD out the arsenal, but who still refused to back his ouster, now can’t crow about the failure of the Bush Administration to find any WMD …
… right?
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 14th, 2005 and is filed under Dumb Things Said By Smart People, Smart Things Said By Smart People, The War On Terrorism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
July 24th, 2005 at 8:14 pm
Right. Gloating would be cheap. But I bet you it doesn’t stop people if a true connection is found.