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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eashoa' M'sheekha who wrote (53327)	10/20/2002 2:13:05 AM
From: stockman_scott	Respond to of 281500

Bush's parallel universe comment from a London-based journalist... Bush's parallel universe By Brendan O'Neill October 18, 2002 brendanoneill.net In recent days, French President Jacques Chirac has questioned American claims of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. 'To my knowledge, no proof has been found of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, or in any case none has been made official', says Chirac. Iraqi officials have once again denied having any connection to bin Laden and his henchmen. 'We are a secular country with no linkages with any fundamentalist movement like al-Qaeda', said Saad Al-Samarai, the Iraqi Charge d'Affaires in Canberra. 'We ourselves are victims of terrorism, so what is this war on terror?' Experts have also questioned claims of a link. When I interviewed Alex Standish of Jane's Intelligence a couple of months back he said there was 'no way' Iraq and al-Qaeda could be linked. '[T]hey are diametrically opposed', said Standish. 'Absolutely, diametrically opposed. It seems the US State Department and others do not understand the basic, big difference in ideology between Iraq and al-Qaeda. 'Saddam's Ba'ath Party regime, despite its Islamic trappings, is a deeply secular and fundamentally socialist ideology. It is an Arab nationalist regime, which clearly resents Western influence anywhere in its backyard. But that doesn't mean it shares any of the Islamic extremism of al-Qaeda, because it doesn't.' But the bizarre thing is this: the more people, politicians and experts question the idea that Iraq and al-Qaeda are linked, the more the Bush administration makes these claims central among its arguments for bombing Baghdad. Despite the dearth of evidence, Bush and co are going further and further down the Saddam/bin Laden route. Why? Bush officials seem to be aware that there is scant evidence of a link. Asked recently whether bin Laden and Saddam were in cahoots, US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld said: 'I have no desire to go beyond saying the answer is yes.' Why not? Possibly because there is nothing more to say than 'yes', nothing substantial or real that could possibly convince the rest of us. Rumsfeld hopes that his insistence that 'yes there's a link' will be enough to win over people's support. As for Bush, he combines official-sounding statements about there 'certainly being a link' with wishy-washy claims that both Saddam and bin Laden are evil, both hate America, and both have been known to carry out violent acts, so there must be a link. 'I can't distinguish between the two, because they're both equally as bad, and equally as evil and equally as destructive', says Bush '....[T]he danger is that al-Qaeda becomes an extension of Saddam's madness and his hatred and his capacity to extend weapons of mass destruction around the world.' By employing words like 'evil', 'destructive', 'madness' and 'hatred', Bush hopes he can leapfrog any demands for hard evidence. After all, who needs evidence when you're faced with such a mad, all-encompassing threat? Bush went furthest in his claims of a Saddam/bin Laden link in the wake of the Bali bombing. Without a shred of evidence, he claimed that Saddam was trying to use al-Qaeda as a 'forward army'. '[Saddam] is a man who we know has had connections with al-Qaeda; this is a man who, in my judgement, would like to use al-Qaeda as a forward army', said Bush - calling on the world to support both 'the war on terror and the war on Saddam'. Here Bush seems to be hoping that all the endless claims of a link will have sunk into people's minds - claiming that 'we all know' that Iraq has connections with al-Qaeda. Really? The reason Bush and his officials are stepping up their claims of a link even as experts and others question such claims is because America's 'evidence' for invading Iraq exists in a parallel universe to what is happening on the ground. There is no evidence that Saddam poses a threat to the West; there is no evidence that Saddam is making weapons of mass destruction; there is no evidence that Iraq is trying to acquire a nuclear weapon; and there is no evidence that Saddam has anything to do with bin Laden. When all your so-called 'evidence' is so far divorced from the real world, then there's nothing to stop you from making wilder and wilder claims about Iraq and al-Qaeda. So even as such claims get ridiculed more and more, we'll hear no end of them. Posted by brendan at October 18, 2002 12:43 PM