Iraq and al Qaeda
Who's campaigning to deny the links?
Friday, October 25, 2002 12:01 a.m. EDT
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html
Is President Bush going to war with Iraq based on a false premise, or worse, a lie? That's quite a charge, yet it's the gravamen of what looks like an orchestrated campaign to suggest that it's crazy to believe that Saddam Hussein would ever join arms with al Qaeda.
That implication is showing up in a spate of recent stories quoting "intelligence sources" who are conveniently anonymous. We don't blame the press corps for having sources, though the anonymity does give the leakers the ability to hide their motives. We'll elaborate on what those might be below, but first we'd point to some clear, public evidence of an Iraq-al Qaeda link that the media have overlooked in their fondness for cloak-and-dagger sourcing.
Mr. Bush has been blunt on the point, for starters. In his October 7 Cincinnati speech, he noted that Iraq and al Qaeda have "high-level contacts that go back a decade" and that a "very senior" al Qaeda leader was in Baghdad this year for medical treatment. Also, "Iraq has trained al Qaeda members in bomb-making and poisons and deadly gasses."
As for "intelligence sources," America's most prominent is CIA Director George Tenet. A recent letter in his name to Congress laid out the following evidence, which we reprint at length since everyone else seems to have ignored it:
"*Our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda is evolving and is based on sources of varying reliability. Some of the information we have received comes from detainees, including those of high rank.
"*We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade.
"*Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qaeda have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression.
"*Since Operation Enduring Freedom, we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al-Qaeda members, including some that have been in Baghdad.
"*We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda's leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. [weapons of mass destruction] capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.
"*Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al Qaeda, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent U.S. military action."
Presumably Mr. Tenet wasn't making all of this up, and presumably his claims are based on the work of his own "sources" in the U.S. intelligence community. If their boss believes these things, the question is why CIA underlings would tell reporters that they don't.
One reason may be that these are the same CIA (or State Department) analysts who've been wrong all along about Saddam. Wrong that he would fall in 1991, within two months of his Gulf War defeat. Wrong that he was years away from getting nukes. Wrong to underestimate, and undermine, the Iraqi opposition in the mid-1990s.
They may now be trying, anonymously, to discredit those who've been right about Saddam all along--notably Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his policy allies. These are no doubt the same trusty sources who leaked word to the New York Times yesterday that Mr. Rumsfeld is so unhappy with the quality of information on Iraq that he's set up his own intelligence unit within Defense to assess the threat.
The leakers are particularly skeptical of the notion that the secular Saddam Hussein would ever team up with the fundamentalist Osama bin Laden. We guess they've never heard of Hitler and Stalin and the non-aggression pact they signed in 1939. Or maybe they think the usual laws of human nature don't apply to Saddam and bin Laden. There's an Arab proverb that goes something like: "Me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against the world." In the West, we say: "The enemy of my enemy is my friend."
It's not hard to see that Saddam and bin Laden share common goals. Bin Laden's famous 1998 fatwa reads a lot like Iraq's current agenda: Expel the Americans from the Middle East, control the Arabian oil fields, identify with the Palestinians to destroy Israel. Once America is out of the picture, there'll be plenty of time for the two to fight each other.
As a madman pursuing nuclear weapons, Saddam doesn't need al Qaeda ties to be dangerous. But to assume that the two have no ties because we haven't yet found proof beyond a reasonable doubt is the sort of wishful thinking that gets Americans killed. Mr. Bush has been loyal to a fault to Mr. Tenet, so perhaps it's time Mr. Tenet returned the favor by exercising some control over his "sources." |
