Rolling Rockefeller
The vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee once saw
"a substantial connection between Saddam and al Qaeda."
Not any more.
by Stephen F. Hayes
The Weekly Standard
06/30/2005 12:00:00 AM
FEW PEOPLE have been more critical of the Iraq war than
Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from West Virginia.
He has over the past two years repeatedly accused the Bush administration of deliberately deceiving the American public to take the nation to war. It's hard to imagine a more serious charge. And Rockefeller makes it perhaps more credibly than most Iraq War critics--as the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
It's no surprise then that reporters sought out Rockefeller for his reaction to George W. Bush's address to the nation Tuesday night. The junior senator from West Virginia minced no words.
Iraq, he said:
"had nothing to do with Osama bin Laden, it had nothing
to do with al-Qaida, it had nothing to do with September
11, which he managed to mention three or four times and
infer three or four more times."
This, Rockefeller seems to find outrageous.
"It's sort of amazing that a president could stand up
before hundreds of millions of Americans and say that
and come back to 9/11--somehow figuring that it clicks a
button, that everybody grows more patriotic and more
patient. Well, maybe that's good p.r. work, which it
isn't, but it's not the way that a commander in chief
executes a war. And that's his responsibility in this
case."
It is an attack on President Bush that echoes those we've heard from Democrats--both those on the fringe left and those at the top of the party--for the past 27 months.
And it is nonsense.
This is what Jay Rockefeller said on the floor of the U.S. Senate on October 10, 2002. His speech announced his support for the resolution authorizing the Iraq war.
As the attacks of September 11 demonstrated, the immense
destructiveness of modern technology means we can no
longer afford to wait around for a smoking gun.
September 11 demonstrated that the fact that an attack
on our homeland has not yet occurred cannot give us any
false sense of security that one will not occur in the
future. We no longer have that luxury.
September 11 changed America. It made us realize we must
deal differently with the very real threat of terrorism,
whether it comes from shadowy groups operating in the
mountains of Afghanistan or in 70 other countries around
the world, including our own.
There has been some debate over how "imminent" a threat
Iraq poses. I do believe that Iraq poses an imminent
threat, but I also believe that after September 11, that
question is increasingly outdated.
By my count, that's four references to September 11 in just three paragraphs, as rendered by Rockefeller's own Senate website. And there, in the final paragraph of that passage, Rockefeller says something the Bush administration managed to avoid saying: that Iraq posed an imminent threat. It's worth noting, further, that the resolution that Rockefeller supported made specific mention of al Qaeda's presence in Iraq:
"Members of al Qaeda, an organization bearing
responsibility for attacks that occurred on September
11, are known to be in Iraq."
What of Rockefeller's comments yesterday that Iraq had nothing to do with al Qaeda?
Rockefeller didn't mention Osama bin Laden's global terror network in his floor speech that day.
Here's what he did say:
"Saddam's government has contact with many international
terrorist organizations that likely have cells here in
the United States."
"He could make those weapons [WMD] available to many
terrorist groups which have contact with his government,
and those groups could bring those weapons into the U.S.
and unleash a devastating attack against our citizens. I
fear that greatly."
He added:
Some argue it would be totally irrational for Saddam
Hussein to initiate an attack against the mainland
United States, and they believe he would not do it. But
if Saddam thought he could attack America through
terrorist proxies and cover the trail back to Baghdad,
he might not think it so irrational.
If he thought, as he got older and looked around an
impoverished and isolated Iraq, that his principal
legacy to the Arab world would be a brutal attack on the
United States, he might not think it so irrational. And
if he thought the U.S. would be too paralyzed with fear
to respond, he might not think it so irrational.
I called Rockefeller's office Wednesday in an attempt to learn the names of the "many terrorist groups" whose contacts with the former Iraqi regime helped create an "imminent threat." And which of those "international terrorist organizations likely have cells here in the United States" that threaten us
here at home.
Wendy Morigi, Rockefeller's communications director, returned the call. "He was talking about the Palestinian groups that had established relationships with Saddam," she said. "Abu Nidal was living in Baghdad before the war."
Maybe. But one week before his floor speech, Rockefeller gave an interview to the Charleston Gazette. The senator hypothesized about Saddam "getting older" and using not Palestinian groups but al Qaeda to do his dirty work.
Rockefeller told the paper.
"If you go pre-emptive, do you cause Hussein to strike
where he might not have? He is not a martyr, not a
Wahabbi, not a Muslim radical. He does not seek
martyrdom. But he is getting older,"
"Maybe he is seeking a legacy by attacking Israel or
using al-Qaeda cells around the world."
I asked Morigi if Senator Rockefeller believed before the war that Iraq had a relationship with al Qaeda. "No."
Odd then that Senator Rockefeller would have spoken of a "substantial connection between Saddam and al Qaeda" just one month before the Iraq War began.
In some interviews Rockefeller did say that he hadn't seen evidence of close ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. But asked about an Iraq-al Qaeda relationship by CNN's Wolf Blitzer on February 5, 2003, Rockefeller agreed with Republican Senator Pat Roberts that Abu Musab al Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before the war and his links to a poison camp in northern Iraq were troubling. Rockefeller continued:
"The fact that Zarqawi certainly is related to the death
of the U.S. aid officer and that he is very close to bin
Laden puts at rest, in fairly dramatic terms, that there
is at least a substantial connection between Saddam and
al Qaeda."
Is this really the same person who now says Iraq "had nothing to do with al Qaeda" and who finds it somehow improper to mention the Iraq war and 9/11 in the same speech?
Since Rockefeller's recent critique deals specifically with Iraq and terrorism, I will resist the temptation to dwell here on other aspects of Rockefeller's 2002 speech. It's worth noting, however, that the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee told his colleagues that
"there is unmistakable evidence that Saddam Hussein is
working aggressively to develop nuclear weapons and will
likely have nuclear weapons within the next five years."
And: "Saddam's existing biological and chemical weapons
capabilities pose a very real threat to America, now."
And: "We cannot know for certain that Saddam will use the
weapons of mass destruction he currently possesses, or
that he will use them against us. But we do know Saddam
has the capability."
Unmistakable evidence. Existing biological and chemical weapons capabilities. We do know Saddam has the capability. Remember these things the next time you hear Rockefeller and his colleagues accuse the Bush Administration of exaggerating or fabricating the threat from Iraq.
Rockefeller ended his 2002 floor speech with yet another direct reference to September 11--his fifth.
"September 11 has forever changed the world. We may not
like it, but that is the world in which we live. When
there is a grave threat to Americans' lives, we have a
responsibility to take action to prevent it."
Good point.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. He is author of The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America, published by Harper Collins
weeklystandard.com
