An Intelligent Democrat . . .
From the December 15, 2003 issue: on the Senate Intelligence Committee.
by Stephen F. Hayes
12/15/2003, Volume 009, Issue 14
A LEADING DEMOCRAT on the Senate Intelligence Committee has reiterated his support for the war in Iraq and encouraged the Bush administration to be more aggressive in its preemptive measures to protect Americans. Evan Bayh, a Democrat from Indiana and a leader of moderates in the Senate, responded to questions last week on the war in Iraq and a memo detailing links between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden sent to the committee in late October by Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith and later excerpted in these pages.
"Even if there's only a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would cooperate, the question is whether that's an acceptable level of risk," Bayh told me. "My answer to that would be an unequivocal 'no.' We need to be much more pro-active on eliminating threats before they're imminent."
Asked about the growing evidence of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, Bayh said: "The relationship seemed to have its roots in mutual exploitation. Saddam Hussein used terrorism for his own ends, and Osama bin Laden used a nation-state for the things that only a nation-state can provide. Some of the intelligence is strong, and some of it is murky. But that's the nature of intelligence on a relationship like this--lots of it is going to be speculation and conjecture. Following 9/11, we await certainty at our peril."
The comments came days before several Democratic presidential candidates intensified their caustic attacks on the Bush administration's foreign and defense policies. Senator John
Kerry, in a speech last week to the Council on Foreign Relations, said that "the Bush administration has pursued the most arrogant, inept, reckless, and ideological foreign policy in modern history. . . . The global war on terrorism has actually been set back."
Democratic frontrunner Howard Dean went further, even giving credence to a conspiracy theory that Bush was forewarned of the September 11 attacks by the Saudis. In an interview on National Public Radio, Dean allowed that this was "nothing more than a theory, it can't be proved." Nonetheless, he called it the "most interesting theory" he has heard as to why the Bush administration isn't cooperating more fully with the commission looking into the September 11 attacks.
Bayh declined to speak about any of the 50 specific Iraq-al Qaeda links cited in the Feith memo, and said the intelligence community reported before the war that intelligence on the links to "9/11 and al Qaeda" was the weakest part of the justification for war in Iraq.
"Look, there were multiple reasons to remove Saddam Hussein, not the least of which was his butchering of his own people--that's the kind of thing that most progressives used to care about. We were going to have to deal with him militarily at some time in the future. The possibility--even if people thought it unlikely--that he would use weapons of mass death or provide them to terrorists was just too great a risk."
Still, Bayh rejects the conventional wisdom that cooperation between Hussein and bin Laden was implausible because of religious and ideological differences. "They were certainly moving toward the philosophy that 'the enemy of my enemy is my friend.' Both were hostile to us, and while they historically had reasons not to like each other, that historical skepticism is overridden by the enmity and mutual hostility toward us. These are not illogical ties from their perspective." |
