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

To: GST who wrote (120838)	12/2/2003 1:42:22 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Iraq posed a terrorist threat primarily to Israel through its use of proxies to conduct suicide bombings. I don't think we know this at all. Paying Palestinian suicide bombers was Saddam's only public endorsement of terrorism; but that hardly means it was his only endorsement. May I point out that Saddam chose to defend himself, not through a beefed up Iraqi army, but by creating an army of imported terrorists/jihadists - Uday's Fedayeen? You may chose to think that this was a brand-new and unprecendented alliance, and all those stories of Iraqi intelligence backing Ansar al Islam mean nothing, and the (quite considerable) Iraqi ties to the first WTC attack, also mean nothing, nor the various pieces of intelligence regarding later Al Qaeda-Iraqi ties. You may chose to believe it all means nothing. I doubt it. I doubt it extremely. Saddam wanted to get back at the US in the worst way; he could not do so openly (though he kept trying); Al Qaeda had proved it could strike effectively; therefore an alliance between them strikes me as the most natural thing in the world. What's more, I doubt that Bush would have been as anxious to attack Iraq after 9/11 (and he plainly was anxious) if he did not have evidence that made him believe that Saddam would be likely to back another Al Qaeda strike.