Surprise, surprise
By Sean Aqui | Related entries in Foreign Policy, Military, The War On Terrorism, WarThe promised Senate report is out, and the main conclusion shouldn’t surprise anyone who hasn’t shared the White House’s isolation chamber for the last five years.
There’s no evidence Saddam Hussein had ties with al-Qaida, according to a Senate report on prewar intelligence that Democrats say undercuts President Bush’s justification for invading Iraq.
Bush administration officials have insisted on a link between the Iraqi regime and terror leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Intelligence agencies, however, concluded there was none.
Republicans counter this is “old news.” I’d agree with them…. if the administration didn’t continue to insist that Iraq had terror connections, and that the invasion was justified. For it to be “old news”, war supporters actually have to accept it as true.
And as I noted yesterday, we’re still waiting for the real report: What, if anything, the administration did to manipulate or shade the intelligence it received. We won’t know until the report comes out, but allow me a purely speculative question: why would Congressional Republicans tie that particular report up in knots unless there actually was something to hide?
Let us hope the truth comes out sooner rather than later. Yes, we have to deal with the hand we’re currently holding, however it was dealt. But knowing what happened will help us avoid making similar mistakes in the future — and give us an idea of whom to believe and whom to dismiss.
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September 9th, 2006 at 11:59 pm
To be precise, Iraq DID have “terror connections” - Hussein offered $20,000 to the family of any successful suicide bomber in Israel, and had sponsored a variety of terrorist attacks against American interests around the world. It doesn’t appear that he or his government had much if anything to do with the 9/11 attacks, but they were certainly a state sponsor of terrorism.
Now, whether Iraq was the right target, given that there are several state sponsors of terror, I leave to others…
September 10th, 2006 at 12:56 am
Actually it was $25000, to induce Palestinians to “volunteer” unwanted relatives to blow themselves up in Israel. Reuters quoted Tariq Aziz on 3/11/02: “President Saddam Hussein has recently told the head of the Palestinian political office, Faroq al-Kaddoumi, his decision to raise the sum granted to each family of the martyrs of the Palestinian uprising to $25,000 instead of $10,000.”
Abu Abbas, the Achille Lauro hijacker, was released by the Italians because he held a valid Iraqi diplomatic passort. Abu Nidal was harbored by Saddam for three years before his apparent murder.
But there’s no arguing logic with the left on this. They are committed emotionally to “Saddam Hussein had no ties to terrorism” and they will go to their graves believing it.
September 11th, 2006 at 9:14 pm
As has been noted ad nauseum, payments to the families of Palestinian terrorists was very old news, and not the sort of terrorism most people considered cause for toppling Saddam.
If that’s your standard we should topple every single Arab regime that supports the Palestinians or hates Israel — in other words, all of them.
Abu Abbas was a member of the Palestine Liberation Front. Not Al Qaeda. Saddam had been sheltering him (and keeping him inactive, BTW) since the mid-1980s.
Abu Nidal, likewise, was a Palestinian militant. Not Al Qaeda. He was a paranoid psychotic and a very bad man. But he only came to Iraq in 1999 after being expelled from Libya, and Saddam had him axed in 2002. While in Iraq he was not active as a terrorist.
Abu Nidal did his worst work while sheltered by Libya. I notice Libya hasn’t been invaded. In fact, we’re currently seeking to improve relations with Ghaddafi.
Serving as a Palestinian terrorist retirement home is also not the sort of “state support for terror” we had in mind after 9/11. That might be why those connections were not seriously cited as a major reason to invade Iraq.
September 12th, 2006 at 2:06 am
I think most of the left doesn’t try to say that Saddam has NO ties to terrorism, but that he had no significant link to Al Qaeda and to 9/11, the two main lies that this administration created to justify attacking him.
Of course Saddam was a bad man, who had killed lots of people in his country, and made inflammatory remarks about Israel. But I’d say he was at best a 4 or 5 on the scale of international bad guys where Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin rate a 10. All you have to do is look at any of a dozen countries in Africa to find far worse regular atrocities than Saddam ever perpetrated - but there’s no oil in most of those areas, and they didn’t piss off cowboy Bush so we ignore them.
September 12th, 2006 at 10:47 am
I think the Kurds would beg to differ, sleipner.
Saddam was at least an 8, and rising.
September 12th, 2006 at 11:36 am
How could he have been rising if the greatest of the atrocities under his regime occurred during the 80’s? I’d say he was declining pretty steadily since being slapped down during the Kuwait invasion.
Granted he was horrible to the Kurds…but just look at Rwanda and Darfur. Death tolls and other horrific atrocities in either place blow away everything that happened associated with Saddam, often by several orders of magnitude.
September 12th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
Let’s be clear about what we’re talking about. As has been stated by others, I don’t think any rational people on the left have argued that Saddam would never have any association with terrorism. But the issue wasn’t whether Abu Abbas had an Iraqi passport (and are we now saying that a government actively supports the beliefs and activities of anyone who holds its passport? What a slender thread.) And we’re not talking about support for Palestinian suicide bombers. Here’s the quote from Bush’s 2003 State of the Union: “Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda. Secretly, and without fingerprints, he could provide one of his hidden weapons to terrorists, or help them develop their own.” So Glen Wishard, I can see why you feel you can’t talk logic with the left, when your logic is based on such flimsy facts.
September 13th, 2006 at 3:56 am
Sean, your article states “I’d agree with them…. if the administration didn’t continue to insist that Iraq had terror connections.”
I continue to insist the same, and calling it “old news” is not an argument. Neither is discounting terror connections on the grounds that other nations have them, too. Neither is saying “Why don’t we just nuke everybody?”
ChrisO: Do you know what a diplomatic passport is? You can’t go down and pick one up at the Post Office. A diplomatic passport identifies you as a diplomatic agent of a recognized country, entitled to diplomatic immunity.
Finally, it’s ridiculous for anyone to claim to know what Abu Nidal did while he was in Iraq, and it’s equally ridiculous to claim to know with certainty that Iraq’s known communications with Al Qaeda had nothing to do with terrorism, or that other contacts existed that we don’t know about.
You get to say, “Nobody can prove Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein planned a terrorist attack.” You don’t get to play omniscient God and absolve him.