Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies
The New York Times
September 30, 2002
By DANIEL BENJAMIN
WASHINGTON
As the Bush administration works to strengthen support for a war against Iraq,
it is sowing a dangerous confusion about the relationship
between Al Qaeda and the regime of Saddam Hussein. Arguing, as the
president did last week, that the two are "equally as bad, equally as evil and
equally as destructive" - and that "you can't distinguish between Al Qaeda
and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror" - reinforces widely
held misunderstandings about the extraordinary danger of the new religious terrorism.
Undoubtedly, Saddam Hussein is eager to procure weapons of mass destruction,
including a nuclear bomb, and to dominate the Persian Gulf region.
These facts provide the basis for strong arguments in favor of removing him from power.
But such arguments need to be considered in their own
right, and with the clear understanding that attacking Iraq would not be
a continuation of the war against terror but a deviation from it.
Iraq and Al Qaeda are not obvious allies. In fact, they are natural enemies.
A central tenet of Al Qaeda's jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim
rulers and their regimes have oppressed the believers and plunged
Islam into a historic crisis. Hence, a paramount goal of Islamist revolutionaries
for almost half a century has been the destruction of the regimes of such
leaders as Presidents Gamal Abdel Nasser, Anwar el-Sadat and Hosni
Mubarak of Egypt, President Hafez al-Assad of Syria, the military government
in Algeria and even the Saudi royal family.
To contemporary jihadists, Saddam Hussein is another
in a line of dangerous secularists, an enemy of the faith who refuses to rule by Shariah and
has habitually murdered Sunni and Shiite religious leaders in Iraq who might oppose his regime.
During the Persian Gulf war, Omar Abdel Rahman,
the radical sheik now imprisoned in the United States, summed up the
Islamist view when he was asked what the punishment should be for those
who supported the United States in the conflict. He answered, "Both [those]
who are against and the ones who are with Iraq should be killed."
In the years since, opposition to secular regimes has remained central
to Islamist thinking. What has changed is the radicals' strategy for toppling
these governments. After decades in which jihadists were defeated by security
services in their home countries, Osama bin Laden and his followers
decided that they would attack the "far enemy," the United States, which
they believe is the primary source of strength for the secularist regimes in
the Arab world. If the United States withdrew its support, the "near enemy"
that holds power in Muslim capitals would be unable to defend itself.
Like other Middle Eastern rulers, Saddam Hussein has long recognized
that Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamists represent a threat to his regime.
Consequently, he has shown no interest in working with them against their
common enemy, the United States. This was the understanding of
American intelligence in the 1990's. In 1998, the National Security Council
assigned staff to determine whether that conclusion was justified. After
reviewing all the available intelligence that could have pointed to a connection
between Al Qaeda and Iraq, the group found no evidence of a
noteworthy relationship.
Later, an indirect link appeared. A Sudanese effort to procure chemical
weapons, which Mr. bin Laden had invested in, seemed to rely on an Iraqi
production method.
Today it is known that the Iraqi regime supports radical Islamists
in Iraqi Kurdistan to undermine pro-American Kurdish groups, but there is no
other indication that Mr. Hussein has changed his fundamental policy.
The claims of the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary
of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that senior Qaeda officials have been in Baghdad
and that there is evidence of cooperation on weapons of mass
destruction represent a dramatic departure from the record and, as such,
ought to be aired as comprehensively as possible.
Iraq has indeed sponsored terrorism in the past but always of the traditional
variety: it sought to eliminate Iraqi opponents abroad or, when
conspiring against others, to inflict enough harm to show the costs
of confronting it. But Mr. Hussein has remained true to the unwritten rules of
state sponsorship of terror: never get involved with a group that cannot be
controlled and never give a weapon of mass destruction to terrorists who
might use it against you.
A more realistic assessment of the relationship between Al Qaeda
and Mr. Hussein weakens the arguments for immediate action against Iraq - and
strengthens those for focusing on the jihadists first. After all, while we may
have to go to war with Mr. Hussein eventually, he still has a country
that he wishes to hold on to, and that fact will govern all his calculations.
Mr. bin Laden, by contrast, has said that Muslims have a duty to obtain
nuclear weapons. After Sept. 11, no one should doubt that he and his followers
would put them to use.
It is also worth considering how a war in Iraq might further the jihadist cause.
With his regime threatened, Mr. Hussein might break the taboo on
giving terrorists weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, as images
of the United States attacking another Muslim nation are beamed throughout
the Middle East and South Asia, many will take it as confirmation of Mr. bin
Laden's argument that America is at war with Islam.
The last war against Iraq was a catalytic event for the Islamists who formed Al Qaeda.
We should not be complacent and believe that the next one
will be different, or that the jihadist violence cannot grow worse.
Daniel Benjamin served on the National Security Council from 1994 to 1999. He is the co-author of ``The Age of Sacred Terror.''
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