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The Truth about the Saddam - al Qaeda
Connection
Robert S. Leiken
The Bush administration can argue that its claim of
Iraqi “stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction” was
supported by domestic and foreign intelligence agencies
and most independent authorities. Not so with its other
main justification for the war – that Saddam would
provide such weapons to al Qaeda. This supposition, and
not the linking of Iran, Iraq and North Korea, composed
“the axis of evil,” which Bush defined in his
2002 State of the Union address as “states…and their
terrorist allies.” To this very day the administration
asserts on the campaign stump, as Dick Cheney did on
October 15, that Iraq was where “the nexus
between the terrorists on the one hand and the deadly
technologies on the other could occur.”
Even before the war this claim flew in the face of the
opinions of intelligence agencies and virtually every
independent authority. But far from accepting that
consensus, as with weapons of mass destruction, the Bush
administration
established an office in the Pentagon specifically
devoted to supporting the contrary view. Post hoc, the
final report of the 9-11 Commission stated
definitively that it had found “no evidence [of] a
collaborative operational relationship.” The report of
the Senate Select committee on Intelligence, scathing in
its exposure of CIA’s errors regarding Iraq’s weapons of
mass destruction,
found (http://intelligence.senate.gov/iraqreport2.pdf
) the CIA’s judgments on Iraq-al Qaeda “reasonable and
objective.”
These conclusions of bi-partisan panels,
chaired by Republicans, echoed the judgment of virtually
every outside authority. Rohan Gunaratna’s encyclopedic
study of al Qaeda characterized its links by
tabulating calls from Bin Laden’s satellite phone. 1/5
of the total went to Britain, the next highest to Yemen,
then Iran, Azerbaijan, the Sudan, Pakistan, Saudi
Arabia, and Egypt. Iraq did not even make the list. As
Sebastian Rotella reported in the Los Angeles Times,
Tony Blair’s foreign secretary Jack Straw, Baltasar
Garzon, the magistrate investigating the Madrid bombings
and Jean Louis Bruguiere, the renowned French
counterterrorism investigator all flatly denied “links”
between Iraq and al Qaeda.
Yet the Administration persists in sustaining the
opposite, perhaps because this summer
56% of Americans found the al Qaeda-Saddam axis
claim convincing. An October
poll reported that 42% of those surveyed even
believed Saddam was behind the 9-11 attacks,
notwithstanding the President’s own specific denial of
Iraqi involvement in 9-11. First impressions die hard,
but careful voters should revisit this issue. As an
undecided voter working at the Nixon
Center, my inclination to vote for Bush has waned in the face of his
deceptive characterization of this matter. The stubborn
aggrandizement of a few scattered, inevitable feelers
between Saddam’s intelligence services and al Qaeda is
the richest of the exaggerations that surrounded the war
on both sides (that Iraq possessed weapons of mass
destruction, that the Arab street would rise on behalf
of Saddam, et al). It is especially disturbing because
conflating Saddam and bin Laden reflects both a failure
to understand that terrorism is a method adopted by
often utterly opposed political ideologies or to
comprehend that al Qaeda operates without state
sponsorship.
To follow the attenuation of the claim -- from Iraqi
complicity in 9-11 to a quibble over the meaning of the
word “connection” -- is to witness the unraveling of a
myth. Following the September 11 attacks government
officials and outside authorities declared that Iraq was
responsible. On September 13 Laurie Mylroie, a terrorism
consultant at the Pentagon, pinned the blame on Saddam
in a Wall Street Journal column, an opinion
publicly endorsed by former CIA director Jim Woolsey in
a September 12 2001 television appearance. Mylroie
later
testified “…in many respects, al Qaeda acts as a
front for Iraqi intelligence.” According to the 9-11
Commission Final Report, at Camp David right after
September 11 Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz
argued “that Iraq was ultimately the source of the
terrorist problem and should therefore be attacked.”
Later that month
Richard Perle, then Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense
Policy Review Board, argued in the November 2001
The National
Interest we should go after Iraq because the
9/11 attacks were not “planned in caves; they’re planned
in offices by people who have secretaries and support
staffs and research and communications and
technology.”
Prague
As information about
9-11 became available, proponents began to rein in
claims of direct Iraqi operational involvement. Instead
they argued that Iraq played a financial, training, or
logistical role. In December 2001 Vice President Dick
Cheney told Tim Russert “it's
been pretty well confirmed that he [Atta] did go to
Prague and
he did meet with a senior official of the Iraqi
intelligence.
New York Times
columnist William
Safire called this meeting “a fact” in March of 2002.
But it turns out that the sole source for the story was
an agent who only identified Atta after his face
was broadcast around the world. Though Mohammed Atta’s
exact whereabouts from April 4 to April 11 are unknown,
the 9-11 Commission reported the FBI has records that
his cellular phone was used to place numerous calls from
Florida between April 6 and 11. Like the Congressional
Joint Inquiry into the 9/11
attacks, the 9-11 commission, and a Justice
Department
review, the Senate Intelligence Committee
found that “the meeting likely never took place.”
Salman
Pak
In December 2001 in The New York Times Richard
Perle, then Chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy
Review Board, nominated Iraq’s Salman Pak as the 9-11
“terrorist training facility…complete with a passenger
aircraft cabin for training in hijacking,” a view
seconded by Clinton’s former CIA director Woolsey on
Sept. 12. The Bush White House
describes the facility as an al Qaeda training camp.
But according to CIA sources made available to the
Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, most
of the reports linking Salman Pak to al Qaeda derived
from defectors furnished by the Iraqi National Congress
[INC]. One told
Vanity Fair in January 2003 of
training non-Iraqi Islamic
fundamentalists “to hijack aircraft with knives.”
But the CIA judged that the Vanity Fair defector
had “embellished and exaggerated his access” and that
other sources simply repeated his information. Both the
CIA and DIA testified to the Senate they could find
anyone to confirm the training.
As war approached the “axis” slinked to the realm of
speculation. As Bush
put it, Saddam “is a man
who would likely team up with al Qaeda. He could provide
the arsenal for one of these shadowy terrorist
networks….” In August 2002 Safire retreated
disingenuously (“let’s not pretend we must ‘make the
case’ that Saddam personally directed 9/11”) only to
advance the conjecture that “it would make sense” for
Saddam “to use his new weaponry through terrorist
cutouts.” The confessions of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi,
a Libyan captured in
Pakistan in November 2001
underlay the administration claim that Osama bin Laden
collaborated with Iraq on WMDs. But Dana Priest of the
Washington Post reported in August of this year that al
Libi was now was telling interrogators that his
statement was false.
Ansar
al Islam
Head
of the Coalition Provisional Authority L. Paul Bremer
testified in September of 2003 that “There
was particularly a strong connection [between Saddam
and] … an Al Qaida- related group called Ansar
al-Islam.” That statement echoed previous claims by
Powell at the U.N. and by Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Richard Meyers in July of 2003.
Ansar
al-Islam, a Kurdish Islamist group located in
Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq, did enjoy substantial
ties with al Qaeda. But in
2000, when Secretary Powell claimed Baghdad offered safe
haven to al Qaeda via Ansar, neither the group nor its
precursor Jund al Islam
existed. It was always implausible that a
Kurdish-Islamist group knowingly would collaborate with
the Saddam. The Islamic Movement of Iraqi Kurdistan, a
predecessor of Ansar, undertook jihad
against Baghdad in May 1987. That was cordially
reciprocated when Hussein gassed thousands of Kurds at
Halabja in 1988, according to the
International Crisis Group. Saddam was happy to
infiltrate Ansar to spur factional fighting among the
Kurds, or to gather information about his enemies.
Supplying them with weapons of mass destructions was
another matter.
Zarqawi
The
prime exhibit of the supposed Iraq-al Qaeda axis was the
infamous
Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the head of the main faction
of foreign terrorists in Iraq today. At his U.N.
presentation in February 2003 Colin Powell, on the basis
of CIA intelligence, singled out Zarqawi as an
"associate and collaborator" of bin Laden and a
"sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist
network...” In actuality
Zarqawi has been competitor as well as collaborator
with al Qaeda. Only
this
month did he swear bayat, or allegiance, to
bin Laden, demonstrating that such a relationship did
not exist previously.
Zarqawi’s
common with Saddam ground was even narrower. The British
Butler Commission, looking into pre-war intelligence,
concluded Zarqawi
entered pre-war Baghdad to establish
sleeper cells “to attack US targets using car bombs and
other weapons.” The CIA did
forecast that Saddam might turn to Islamists
but only in the context of an imminent
U.S. attack.
As reported by the New York Times,
in August the CIA declared
that on the basis of post-war intelligence, it no longer
sustained that
Baghdad
provided safe haven to Zarqawi fighters; it also
indicated that previous assertions of a relationship
between Zarqawi and Saddam could not be verified.
During
the war Zarqawi called released an audiotape calling
Saddam a “tyrant.” Al Jazeera’s 3 part miniseries
on Zarqawi’s life, “Under the Microscope” reported that
he called the Ba’thists “infidels.” He
cheered the fall of “the repulsive Ba`thi regime,”
calling Saddam “a devil” who “killed the innocent.”
Did the two have contact? Probably. A working
relationship? Possibly. Would Saddam pass WMDs to a man
vowing his destruction and would Zarqawi then pass those
weapons to al Qaeda? The question answers itself.
As each piece of evidence has been impeached, the
assertion that Iraq perpetrated the September 11 attacks
has shriveled to the pettifogging Clintonesque claim of
a “connection,” which of course depends on what a
connection is. As reported by Reuters in June of 2004,
in response to the findings of the 9-11 Commission, Bush
insisted that there was a “relationship” and there were
“numerous contacts” between Iraq and al Qaeda and Cheney
maintained there were “ties” between the two. A
battleship would fit comfortably twixt these and
assertions such as Bush’s October 2002
allegation that Saddam “would
like to use al Qaeda as a forward army.”
On the
stump Bush declares, as he did on October 4th
“here's the danger. Saddam Hussein could have shared
that capability of weapons of mass destruction with the
enemy,” foreshadowing a similar claim by Richard Cheney
in the vice presidential debate. However, asked about
“the relationship between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin
Laden's al Qaeda network,” Defense Secretary Donald
Rumsfeld told the Council on Foreign Relations earlier
this month that he had seen:
the answer to that question migrate in the intelligence community
over a period of a year in the most amazing way. …
there are differences in the intelligence community as
to what the relationship was. … I have not seen any
strong, hard evidence that links the two.
An
intriguing admission, especially in electoral season,
and especially since those “differences in the
intelligence community” owed their existence to a
Pentagon office
created to develop them.
Common sense about the connection
Al Qaeda is the terrorist outgrowth of an Islamist
revival movement. The Baath is an Arabist nationalist
secular political party inspired by Fascism and
Stalinism. The animosity between Islamism and
secularism (in the form of Communism or Arab
nationalism) for two generations bloodied campuses and
cities across the Middle East, including those in Baathi
Syria and Iraq. Saddam executed both Sunni and Shi’ite
extremists and viewed Islamism as a threat to his
regime. He even worked to prevent Iraqi youth from
joining al Qaeda, according to a CIA estimate reviewed
by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Bin
Laden in turn sponsored anti-Hussein Islamist fighters
in Iraqi Kurdistan, according to the 9-11 Commission
Report, and during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait Bin
Laden urged Saudi officials to help him unleash
mujahidin against Iraq.
Of course, Saddam would have been happy to have the
Saudi’s terror network working on his behalf, but that
was not in the ideological cards. Baghdad’s knowledge of
unconventional weapons intrigued Bin Laden. But the CIA
judged, according to the Senate investigation of pre-war
intelligence, that “al-Qaida, including Bin Laden
personally, and Saddam were leery of close cooperation.”
The Senate investigation did report the CIA found
Iraq’s small-scale, sporadic “interaction with al Qaida
is impelled by mutual antipathy towards the United
States and the Saudis.” To picture the real “connection”
between Islamist terrorists like Zarqawi or bin Laden
and Arabists like the Ba’th, consider the relationship
between Nazis and Communists, who likewise shared
antipathy toward the West. They fought on the streets of
Berlin and Hamburg and the Nazi army invaded Soviet
Russia. Could they collaborate? The brief
Hitler-Stalin pact and the alliances of the Comintern’s
short “third period” show that tactical and temporary
totalitarian partnerships against a common enemy do
occur – “tactical and temporary,” because their mutual
enmity remained ideological, programmatic, historical,
strategic, and permanent. And the Nazi-Soviet pact
certainly did not comprehend transfer of available
weapons of mass destruction (neither gases nor chemicals
nor atom or rocket technology).
Apparently
policy-makers, convinced that Saddam would eventually
seize oil rich Kuwait and Saudi Arabia and moved by
justifiable remorse at their failure to back the Shi’ite
rising of 1991-92, embraced the unsubstantiated “axis of
evil” proposition to gain public support for a war they
desired on other grounds. This failure to put business
before pleasure was part of a general underestimation of
the long-range danger of Islamist terrorism which
led, as the Washington Post reported last week,
to a withdrawal of CIA and special forces from
Afghanistan to Iraq, in allowing al Qaeda to metastasize
into a mass movement and our failure to mount any
serious ideological response to it. Now this
administration has awarded Islamist terrorism a new
Afghanistan where indeed the alliance with the
Saddamists and other nationalists is now a
self-fulfilled prophecy – with Islamists
leading and Saddamists supplying the
funding for the insurgency. Should
he win election, it will fall to John Kerry to defuse
this ticking bomb in
Iraq. Should Bush emerge victorious, his first order of
business should be to rid himself of those whose
analysis of international terrorism has proved so
defective; for how can we fight a war against terrorism
with such counselors?
Robert S. Leiken is the Director of the Immigration
and National Security Program at the Nixon Center and
author of
Bearers of Global Jihad? Immigration and National
Security after 9/11
Updated
10/28/04
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