“Bin Laden Sought ‘Joint Operations’ With Saddam”. Yes, it’s Newsmax. But hell, if Jane Hamsher or Arianna Huffington can quote, say, the Nation or Alec Baldwin with a straight face, I reserve the right to cite Newsmax on occasion. And besides, Newsmax is referencing the Weekly Standard, whose credibility is not in dispute (except among those who dismiss anything “conservative” as ipso facto unreliable). Just, y’know, trust but verify:
An Iraqi intelligence document released last week indicates that Osama bin Laden sought to conduct “joint operations” with Saddam Hussein’s regime six years before the 9/11 attacks – and was given the green light by the Iraqi dictator.
The document, detailed in the March 27 issue of the Weekly Standard, describes a Feb. 1995 meeting between bin Laden and Iraqi intelligence that was personally approved by “the Honorable Presidency” – an apparent reference to Saddam.
“We discussed with [bin Laden] his organization. He requested the broadcast of the speeches of Sheikh Sulayman al-Uda [who has influence within Saudi Arabia and outside due to being a well known religious and influential personality] and to designate a program for them through the broadcast directed inside Iraq, and to perform joint operations against the foreign forces in the land of Hijaz [Saudi Arabia].”
The document goes on to note that “the Honorable Presidency was informed of the details of the meeting in our letter 370 on March 4, 1995.”
The document indicates that Saddam personally granted bin Laden’s request for help with propaganda broadcasts and instructed his agents “to develop the relationship [with bin Laden] and the cooperation between the two sides to see what other doors of cooperation and agreement open up.”
The 1997 Iraqi intelligence document goes on to report: “Currently we are working to invigorate this relationship through a new channel in light of his present location [Afghanistan].”
The reference by Iraqi intelligence to “joint operations” with bin Laden apparently contradicts one of the 9/11 Commission’s most important findings that Saddam had no “operational relationship” with al Qaeda.
The Jawa Report has the translation of the original document.
In a previous thread, a troll depicted Stephen Hayes, who has stayed on this story from the start, as a “hack”—a notorious crank who simply won’t accept the official narrative that Iraq and UBL had no ties, an official narrative that should be obvious to everyone, given that fundamentalists Islamists and secular Ba’athists are sworn enemies who would never work together (leaving aside that they appear to be doing so in Iraq even as we speak, and that Saddam had a Koran written in his blood as a way, one suspects, to shore up his Muslim bona fides in advance of a war with the west).
Whatever it reveals—and whatever quibbles emerge over the interpretations of these translations—I think it’s fair to say that this new program to expedite the release of these documents will bring the Iraq war into greater clarity, for good or ill. For much more, check out PJ Media’s Iraq Files—which features stories on the documents, as well as translations posted as they become available.
****
See also: Let Freedom Ring Throughout the World and Dread Pundit Bluto.
(h/t CJ Burch)
*****
update: Now what to make of this…?
Hey, wait a minute! Saddam doesn’t like muslims! It’s impossible!
tw: I learned that from Steve J.
There are two ways this story (if correct) can be spun.
One (the Left’s) will be that this proves Saddam was a good guy. After all, Osama approached him, and (presumably) was rebuffed, b/c Saddam was the principled kind of guy who would never, ever, ever, ever cooperate with a Muslim fundi.
Never mind that he might put Koranic verse on the Iraqi flag or any such stuff. Deep down inside, Madeleine O’Hare had nuthin’ on him!
The alternative is an indication of just how silly the whole idea of fundis not talking to secular types is. Because if there’s anyone who should be refusing to talk, it’s Osama, given the hate he purportedly had for Saddam.
Of course, anyone who remembers the Nazi-Soviet pact will know full well that even hatred and loathing can be overcome, if the benefits are sufficient…..
So are you gonna do that with a copy of the GOP platform before the ‘06 elections?
Just to keep up your cred?
Jeff, for future reference, could you try to link to a brighter blogs than Atrios’? The quality of the visitors is awfully poor.
It’s like the 5th time through a book of knock-knock jokes.
There’s not much return on the investment, if you know what I mean.
I’m glad to see these docs finally released and translated, and I hope we get a lot of nuggetty intel out of ‘em.
But, I’m not so sure that what is written in them will be found to correspond to reality in any great degree. Detailed plans, expansive promises, could all still be someone blowing smoke. It’s commonly done in the arab world, from what I’ve gleaned from my reading:
Plots have plots within them; and no outsider can hope to see his way through them. Rewards are lavishly promised. The monarch nods; his kinsmen adopt a serious demeanor. Gigantic sums are mentioned and sometimes even published in the newspapers. The figures bear no relation to what is actually disbursed. There is neither auditing nor accountability. The anxious petitioner must search out who is obstructing him, and why, where the rake-offs must be diverted, who has become resentful or extra-avaricious, how to turn promis into performance. Documents duly signed and witnessed somehow turn into dead ends, into mere rumors and whispers. Months pass. Something
will be done soon, say the intermediaries and middlemen, as they step with dignity from offices into the Mercedes which will sweep them off at high speed into the limbo of their own money-favoring. No appeal is possible.
— David Pryce-Jones, The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs
Turing = type, as in Predicting or interpreting behavior based on an ethnic or cultural type is so 19th century. But still….
SI —
There’s a lesson here, then. If you are gonna blow smoke, then someone rams jets filled with our citizens into buildings filled with our citizens, there’s a 50/50 chance we might actually respond in a way that is unpleasant.
Because we simply can’t take the chance that more of this smoke blowing won’t lead to more collapsed buildings and billowing smoke.
Jeff,
It doesn’t matter. You see, Bush lied. He had his mind made up before the 2000 election that, if elected, he was going to invade Iraq, get rid of Saddam and install a puppet government for the benefit of his oil buddies. He knew 9/11 was going to happen and did nothing to stop it. That way he could have a ready excuse for Iraq. He and everyone else in the Bush Admin was so stupid that they didn’t think what would happen once the public found out that he lied about the WMD.
You see, Bush is evil, he is the Devil incarnate. He doesn’t care about our young servicemen and women getting killed. He and everyone else in the Administration is so incompetent that even comment posters on blogs know more than he does. Hell, even illiterate HS kids know that he lies all of the time. Everyone knows that Iraq is a quagmire and it will never be a democracy. Hell there’s even an upsurge in Afghanistani violence now. The only reason we are staying in Iraq is because Cheney wants Halliburton to keep reaping outlandish profits. Cheney is the true puppetmaster, pulling Bush’s strings. Everyone knows Bush is a stupid, illiterate, drunken cowboy with a drug problem that never had an original thought.
If you could produce a written contract between OBL and Saddam where Saddam agreed to finance the 9/11 attack, with the particulars enumerated, that would not absolve the Lyin’Bush, because everyone knows, in his heart, he would have invaded Iraq regardless. You see, those on the Left know what is in Bush’s heart (those that say he has one), they know exactly what he is thinking and what exactly is his motivations for his actions. Jeff, goddamit! THEY KNOW!!
In other words, Stephen Hayes is speaking truth to power. Too bad he’ll never get credit for it
Jeff,
Oh, I’m very much on board with turning terrorists into pink mist, always have been. I hope I’m a known quality on that score. If I had been President after 9/11, the world might look like a half-eaten apple by now.
I’m just urging caution for people who will glean these documents for after-the-fact justification for the war. I tend to agree with Hitchens, that the very fact that the status of Saddam’s WMD program was unknown is justification enough.
Turing = future, as in Yes, islamabaddies ought to tread carefully in the future, no matter what these documents reveal.
TSI,
You’ve brushed on the one of the more subtle and significant points about the WMD debate. It is entirely possible for a regime interested in demonstrating good faith to disarm and provide ample evidence of the fact. Conversely, a nation that does not intend to disarm can evade intrusive inspection regimes almost indefinitely.
BRD
Unfortunately, I predict that no matter what these documents show, even if thousands of them contain blueprints for a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, whose details would shame those documents beamed to Jody Foster in “Contact”, those who sorely wish Saddam Hussein were still using Iraqi people as landfill will claim that because we didn’t have these documents during the run-up to the military action, the war still began on “false pretenses”…or we were “lied” to.
Stephen Hayes should be awarded a Pulitzer, but the pro-Saddam crowd will still fail to admit that a 12-year festering pro-terrorist problem (Hussein) exacerbated by an ineffective and corrupt U.N. was removed.
Since the “Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction” theory is already fully absorbed and discounted into the public’s understanding, the release of more documents can only have upside for us warmongers. Eventually the old “knowledge” pounded on by the MSM daily, and under which bets have been doubled- and tripled-down by the Democrats, will crumble.
A state modeled on East Germany will have two things if inspected closely: (1) Lots of secrets and (2) Lots of records.
This is not going to play out well for the antiwar folks.
Lurking: Or, the short form, “Molotov:Ribbentrop::Al Quaeda:Hussein”.
(The Ba’athist is of course naturally more comparable to the National Socialist, and the international terrorist organisation to the Soviet Union.)
A few points with which to solicit both broad anti-leftard insults and targeted ad hominem attacks:
– “Sought” does not equal “obtained.” If it did, I’d win the lottery every time I bought a ticket.
– Proving an “operational” relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda isn’t necessary anyway, under the Bush Doctrine, since the principal reason for going to war was that the two might team up in the future to deliver WMD to our shores. Seems there’s some confusion here over whether we attacked Iraq to punish it for past transgressions (officially, we weren’t) or to prevent future transgressions (that was the idea). Wasn’t the Bush Doctrine of preventative war enough?
– The credibility of the “Weekly Standard” is, in fact, in disupute, or should be at least, since it has a clear (and openly acknowledged) bias, and we all know how untrustworthy biased media is, don’t we? I mean, media+bias=misinformation, doesn’t it?
– Snark off: it will be fascinating to see what the Baath regime documented and how. Too bad it’s taken three years. We shoulda taken another lesson from East Germany, and opened up the secret police files immediately, letting everybody in to check out their files and forcing the Iraqis to spend more time examining what they did (and were forced to do) to each other under the Baathists.
– Snark on: Bush did lie. There! I said it! Make me pay!
A few points with which to solicit both broad anti-leftard insults and targeted ad hominem attacks:
– “Sought” does not equal “obtained.” If it did, I’d win the lottery every time I bought a ticket.
– Proving an “operational” relationship between Saddam and Al Qaeda isn’t necessary anyway, under the Bush Doctrine, since the principal reason for going to war was that the two might team up in the future to deliver WMD to our shores. Seems there’s some confusion here over whether we attacked Iraq to punish it for past transgressions (officially, we weren’t) or to prevent future transgressions (that was the idea). Wasn’t the Bush Doctrine of preventative war enough?
– The credibility of the “Weekly Standard” is, in fact, in disupute, or should be at least, since it has a clear (and openly acknowledged) bias, and we all know how untrustworthy biased media is, don’t we? I mean, media+bias=misinformation, doesn’t it?
– Snark off: it will be fascinating to see what the Baath regime documented and how. Too bad it’s taken three years. We shoulda taken another lesson from East Germany, and opened up the secret police files immediately, letting everybody in to check out their files and forcing the Iraqis to spend more time examining what they did (and were forced to do) to each other under the Baathists.
– Snark on: Bush did lie. There! I said it! Make me pay!
Hey, now, set down those goalposts. I thought the claim was they’d never, ever, never, ever, never work together. Is it now going to be “well, maybe they meant to, but nothing came of it”?
Not necessarily. A source with acknowledged bias at least lets you know where they’re coming from, allowing you to season their conclusions and weigh their claims accordingly. In contrast there’s the NYT, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, etc, which will proclaim to be unbiased despite a horrendous slant to both what they cover and how they cover it. Their dishonesty in re their own attitude calls into question their honesty in general.
I agree that anyone making the argument that the two are equal ought to be embarrassed. Next?
IN the event these documents prove to be helpful to the Bush administration in terms of evidencing that Hussein either had or was posturing that he had WMD, I am fairly certain the memme will be that the documents were all forged by tge Bush administration and that the delay in “producing” them was a result of a year of putting them together.
I’m guessing Diebold contracted out the forgery operation. Any takers?
And don’t forget that he added the ultimate Islamic shibboleth, “Allahu Akbar!” (“Our god rocks, yours is a faggot!”), to the Iraqi flag. He also paid for the construction of several new mosques, in direct violation of the Seperation clause. I’m surprised the ACLU didn’t invade Iraq.
Hey if I was going to go to all that trouble I would have some mustard gas manufactured put in some rusty oil drums and buried in the desert in Iraq. Then have its location leaked to the press. Hmm now that I think of it…
“I thought the claim was they’d never, ever, never, ever, never work together.”
Only the real head-in-the-sanders would claim that. But the opposite claim, that “they might work together,” the claim which we dealt with by invading Iraq, would’ve been better dealt with by finding Bin Laden and taking him out of the picture.
After all, we wouldn’t have needed to occupy anybody to do that.
It’s still a great mystery to me and lots of other serious-minded people—and I am a serious-minded person, despite being a leftard— why Bin Laden lost his appeal. He’s the bad guy. He’s the one with the least to lose. Saddam we could contain. He had no interest in nuking us; we’d’ve flattened his country in two seconds. It’s Bin Laden and his network that remains the real threat, and it has yet to be explained to me why it was so urgent that we invade a country that might one day team up with Bin Laden instead of finishing off Bin Laden himself.
It didn’t make sense to me in 2003, and it doesn’t make sense now.
Stephen Hayes, who has stayed on this story from the start, as a “hackâ€Ââ€â€a notorious crank who simply won’t accept the official narrative that Iraq and UBL had no ties
I didn’t claim they had NO ties. I am claiming that they were not collaborating on terrorist strikes agaisnt the U.S.
I didn’t claim they had NO ties. I am claiming that they were not collaborating on terrorist strikes agaisnt the U.S.
If a goalpost is moved by a liberal, with members of the media all around to hear it, does it make a sound?
Actually, that argument merits a more serious response, whether or not it is used disingenuously. I had an argument with a fellow that seized upon the 9/11 commission’s summary declaration that there was “no evidence of an operational connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq” as evidence that there was no connection between the two. I responded, saying that a declaration that there was no evidence of a connection is not the same as evidence of no connection and that the evidence we did have showed that the two parties had had a face-to-face meeting which ended with an agreement to seek a deepening of cooperation.
If this document is valid, it shows direct financial sponsorship of an Al Qaeda affiliate by Iraq. Evidence of just such a deepening of cooperation. My question to those who downplay the evidence of support like this and other instances cataloged by Hayes is this: is there any level of collusion short of material involvement with 9/11 that would justify the war to remove Hussein? Could Saddam have lavished support on Al Qaeda in areas removed from direct attacks on the United States without fear of any reprisal?
beetroot!
If we imagine a threat continuum with “imminent threat” on one end and “ain’t gonna happen for sure” on the other, an operational relationship would be the strongest evidence imaginable for an imminent threat short of picking up formations of armed Iraqi warplanes en route to Washington on radar. In the face of an imminent threat, any military action against Iraq would no longer be pre-emptive in nature but defensive, by definition.
And to those who support the Iraq war, there’s no confusion: Saddam was a proven WMD developer and Al Queda is a proven weapons delivery system. Ergo, they both gotta goâ€â€because we could always fail. Considering that taking out either AQ or the Husseins would greatly lessen the chance of a WMD attack against us, are we better off with one chance at success or two?
It’s not a matter of him losing appeal, it’s a matter of us being able to find him. We may never find him. And if we don’t, he will simply go down in history as just another in a long, long list of villians who was never killed or captured.
If you could make a little less room in your worldview for the efficacy of human power, both political and non-political, and a little more room for simple uncertainty, you would be surprised how much sense this would make to you.
yours/
peter
Peter, I’d suggest that it is YOU that must learn to live with uncertainty:
By that logic, we’ve got to invade Pakistan, Syria, Iran, North Korea, etc etc etc. Because those are all proven developers of WMD. And Al Qaeda could team up with any of them. Your suggestion is that we could be “certain” of safety by eliminating the weapons producer, but I’ll counter that by arguing that such elimination is physically, politically, and practically impossible.
I mean, by your argument, you should be every bit as scared now as you were when Saddam was in power, because Bin Laden can shop anywhere. So we shut down Costco. He goes to Kmart, right? In fact, he’s probably already living in Kmart (i.e. Waziristan), or close to it.
So, like most Americans, I’ve concluded that invading and occupying Iraq hasn’t made us any safer, because it hasn’t substantially reduced the material threat of Al Qaeda, which never, to our knowledge, depended on Saddam for significant operational support.
Now, where the uncertainty part comes in is this: for the forseeable future, Americans will be living on the same planet as a large number of enemies. We cannot kill them all. We cannot occupy them all. You can’t eliminate all the weapons producers.
In my humble opinion, the best we can do is use diplomatic and intelligence work to stay one step ahead of the Qaeda posse, and catch them when we can. Brains not bombs, that’s my strategy. Because uncertainty is here to stay, brother!
Beetroot, it’s been explained; it’s just that you didn’t hear the explanation. And the reason you didn’t hear it is that thinking is mediated by language, and you don’t have the concept-set necessary to even hear the explanation, let alone understand it. You, and many others, consistently try to interpret things as if the people opposed to us were Western urban professionals, and try to apply the thinking of an American college professor to semi-illiterate tribalists living in mud houses. As a result you very often ask the right questions, but the answers you supply (or will accept) are profoundly, utterly askew. So in order to explain this I have to start ‘way back, and I can only cover a tiny corner of it, for which I apologize in advance.
—
We Westerners have long since given up the regular use of revenge as a tool for ordering society; we find it much, much more profitable to pass it off to the State and call it “punishment”. That way we don’t have to be looking over our shoulders all the time, which frees up all that effort for profitable enterprises. Long before Westerners decided that revenge was not useful we had a system in which the offender’s tribe would cooperate with the revenge-seeker, if the offense could be proved, and it is from that seed that the current system grew.
Muslims, particularly Arabs, have not made that conceptual change; in fact, they cling to a version of the revenge culture that is particularly pernicious. If one’s tribe is strong (or duplicitous) enough to prevent the revenge-seeker from taking his satisfaction, it is an evidence of tribal strength, to be sought after if at all possible. The only thing that allows the revenge system to persist is that tribal strength rises and falls with leadership and fortune, so that over time the tribes exist in rough parity, and none is capable of running roughshod over the revenge of the others. Much of what is happening in Iraq at the moment becomes much clearer if it is understood that Saddam’s tribe and its associated clans had become paramount, able to stifle the revenge seekers from other clans with casual indifference, and are desperately seeking to restore that status, because if they do not the revenge bill will be huge. (Incidentally, I think many of the people advising the Iraqis and trying to help miss this point as well. We should be forcefully explaining the State substitute for the revenge system and its advantages for a stable society.)
Note, please, that this isn’t a case of “bad” or “evil”. The revenge system works, as evidenced by the fact that some variant of it is found in every society of any note; it provides a roughly workable form of justice. It’s simply that we, more or less by accident, have come up with something else that works better, at least so far.
Note, also, that I generally use the word “Arabs” to speak of the folk I’m describing. The cultural system I describe is (nowadays) that of the Arabic tribes, which has been taken up into Islam as an ideal culture and taught world-wide. That is why we can sort of get along with Kurds and other non-Arab Muslims; they don’t fully “get it” because the system doesn’t match their own. But make no mistake: it is what the madrassas and the imams teach. [Right, Muslihoon?]
When an Arab sees us hunting Osama, he does not interpret it as “seeking justice”. He, like you, interprets it in the context of his own culture, where it comes out the Americans want to revenge themselves upon Osama for hurting them, and if we can prevent that we elevate our status and depress theirs. It is a game we cannot win. If we catch Osama, for Arabs it is simply another event in the revenge-round, a cause worthy of calling for further revenge. He becomes, in a way, a martyr—though that concept is more than subtly off-kilter; it’s more like a flag to rally around. If we do not catch him, while being seen to try, our impotence is proved, and others are encouraged by that success to try for their own triumphs.
“Catching” Osama, in the Dragnet sense you and a lot of people seem to be calling for it, requires above all information. When Joe Friday ask for “Just the facts, ma’am” the system requires that he receive facts, even if they are misleading or inaccurate; there must be at least data. Ask an Afghan villager or an Arab where Osama might be, and you will not, as a rule, receive data. Those ill-disposed toward us will lie as a matter of course, even those who are neutral will see it as improving their status if they mislead us into failing, and that’s not even counting the likelihood of Osama’s supporters seeing the giving of information as an offense worthy of revenge against the informers—which is an absolute certainty.
If we can’t win, we shouldn’t play. What Bush and his advisors are trying to do is change the game. We don’t want to kill Osama; we don’t even really want to catch him. We want to discredit him, to establish him as impotent, unable to hurt us in any way that matters. So we don’t chase him except in a casual way, as part of other operations. We certainly don’t go clanking through the mountains in division array, blowing dust, HE, and dieselrauch in a futile chase for one sick man, with the onlookers laughing behind their hands and pointing in random directions. “He went thattaway, effendi. [fx::sub voce giggle]”
I don’t want Osama bin Laden dead. I want him to live forever (so he doesn’t get the white grapes, let alone the virgins), with every moment of that long life spent railing at the frustration of his aims. I don’t even want him caught, and I sure as Hell don’t want half of Afghanistan and all of Persia giving us lies and laughing when we take them seriously. I want Osama free, hale, and useless, and aware of it every waking moment.
Regards,
Ric
tw: It is a given that I’m not a nice person.
That’s your solution? Diplomacy and intelligence work?
I’ll give you one thing–at least you’re willing to posit a solution. Most of the anti-war crowd can’t even be pinned down to that extent.
You observe that we’ve shut down the ‘Costco’ of terror, then argue that that’s not a good thing. Granted the Walmart, Kmart, etc are still open, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t taken a step in the right direction.
Works for me–though I’d be willing to give Pakistan a pass for good behavior so long as they continue in their recently discovered willingness to help out. And if such an elimination is presently impossible, ask yourself: how did we arrive at such a pass? How is it that our military has been weakened to the point where it can no longer fight a multi-theater war? I’ll just go ahead and assume you have sufficient brainpower to figure out what I’m insinuating and leave it at that.
>>>>>
Beck, your support is a good thing. I’d be a Hell of a lot happier about it if you weren’t almost as far off base as Beetroot is.
The problem with getting indignant over Lefty dismissal of the matters in the Saddam Papers is that they’re right: they’re minimally if at all relevant. Somehow or another we’ve got to get past all the bullshit and onto the dry ground, where lies the fact that Saddam and Osama were never the objective. They were only in the way.</i>
There exists a fundamental, systematic problem, and Saddam and Osama are just the surface boils and rash resulting from it. Beetroot wants to treat it with poultices and bed rest; you prefer lancing and antiseptics. Neither of you is addressing the problem, and the “cures” you offer are placebos, or at best palliatives applied in the hope that the patient’s system will do the curing.
It is a fundamental of applied violence that you attack the weak spots, and a natural corollary of that axiom is that much of your effort will be spent probing, looking for places that give when you push. When you find one you apply maximum effort there, and leave the strong walls and stalwart defenders facing breezes and moonbeams. Any other philosophy leads eventually to the corrupt system found in Europe prior to the Thirty Years’ War, wherein war was the entertainment of princes—Prince: I’m bored. Courtier: Yes, my Prince. Let us invade Flatonia. Prince: Capital notion! Call up the peasants!
The Islamists really do mean to conquer the world and impose the Islamic Caliphate. They won’t succeed, but the fact that the ambition is large does not discredit it; Man’s reach must exceed his grasp/or what’s a heaven for said the poet, and there was that song about the ant and the aspidistra. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. There’s no stopping a man who knows he’s in the right and keeps on coming.
My own memory extends, with relative clarity, as far back as 1972 and Munich; I know there were previous occurrences, but have no direct mental contact with them. For all that time the Islamists have been probing. In every case there has been, from their point of view, no effective response; their conclusion is that those are soft spots, to be attacked more forcefully next time around.
The function of the Iraq war was to change that perception, the perception that regardless of provocation the West would not respond and was therefore weak, to be attacked with impunity. The Left errs by declaring that attack is not what was meant, and ascribes all sorts of (Western-thought-based) excuses for calling it “defense” or “response”. The right errs by focusing too closely on a specific item, ignoring the larger picture. The war in Iraq could as easily have been in Syria, or Egypt, or Libya, or… The specific choice of Iraq as the place was due to a long string of chance eventualities that made it the right place, but the purpose was to demonstrate that we’re as crazy as they are, and a lot stronger.
It’s this simple: so long as we continue to offer them no resistance they will continue to attack. For the moment the attacks are flea bites. Even the WTC is, on a world scale, insignificant compared to, say, a medium earthquake. But the power of the attacks is growing, from a few guys with AKs shooting up a stadium to blowing up whole buildings, and there’s no reason whatever to expect them to diminish on their own.
Left to the Clinton/law enforcement/beetroot model, the attacks would grow in strength and ferocity until even beetroot was calling for Something to be Done, and at that point there really wouldn’t be any choices. The whole of Islam would have rallied round the “strong horse”, and the only way for our society to survive would be to kill theirs.
I would really, really prefer to do less than that.
Beetroot, the spies-and-diplomacy effort you urge is going on, full-court press, even as we speak, and is succeeding admirably. What you miss is that absent the war, it would be futile, useless, because there would be absolutely no reason for anyone with useful information to cooperate in any way. In fact, there would be a positive disincentive, in that the Islamists will treat informants against them with vicious savagery, while the West would be seen as utterly unable to protect itself, let alone anyone who helped it. Retreating will bring any success to an abrupt halt, because our helpers and informants will suddenly find themselves swinging in the breeze, open to any potshots the Islamists care to issue. At that point the information necessary for diplomacy and “intelligence”—the Dragnet approach—to succeed will dry up and blow away.
Establishing fearsomeness is a necessary part of the strategy, but it’s only palliative, lancing the boils, so to speak. It may be all we can do, especially with the Left chorus obstructing us in every particular, but it was never the ultimate goal, only an interim step. The goal is to offer Middle Easterners a bite of the apple and hope it takes. It was always chancy, but the palliative could only work for so long; one cannot keep lancing boils after the scalpel is getting into muscle tissue. If it works, the problem goes away forever. If it doesn’t, we’ve spent a lot of time and treasure. It’s not that the outcome is certain; it isn’t, not by a long chalk. It’s that the game is worth the candle.
Ironic: one of the reasons George Bush doesn’t defend himself adequately for such hawks as Bill Quick and “Ace” is that the Lefty opposition is tremendously useful. Bush clearly won’t back off, even when strongly attacked by (what looks like, from far away) his own people; clearly he’s at least as nuts as any ayatollah, and he has all those soldiers… spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt among the opposition is always a good thing. Too, all the flak obscures the diplomatic and spy effort. Spies work better in the dark, and having the Press and the Left blowing smoke with such enthusiasm leaves the cloak-and-dagger boys with useful cover.
Beware of simple answers. Life is not a multiple choice test; essay questions all the way, folks.
Regards,
Ric
Who is tired of Oomphel Secrets. Look that one up!
Steve J. sez:
You did that and more. You said Saddam viewed them as a threat, an ememy.
You’ve got an awfully short memory there, Steve J.
tw: Who’s the liar now?
I’m starting to think it isn’t stuck on stupid so much as stuck on binary. Is it a side effect of the computer age that nuance has become a meaningless buzzword?
B Moe: I blame John Kerry.
Usually a safe bet in any case.
Actually, Osama just wanted to burn a fatty with ol’ Saddam.
Beetroot!
You would be right if my logic included in my premises that the threats emanating from all of these countries were equal, and the effort needed to overthrow the juntas that reside in each of them were also equal, but this isn’t the case. Arguing such would also be a like arguing that it wouldn’t benefit us to attempt to cure a disease unless we were able of curing all diseases. Such an argument isn’t very pursuasive.
And I never meant to imply that by going after both AQ and Saddam’s regime that we could be “certain,” merely that we could be more certain than by only going after one of them.
And quite frankly, I feel considerably safer now that Saddam’s junta is no longer. My estimation that Iraq was the most likely place for AQ to get mass casualty weapons was and is based not just on AQ’s purposes, but AQ’s and Saddam’s purposes and resulting coincidence of want and circumstance between the two.
One of the problems faced by the pro-war side of the debate is that it’s much easier for the anti-war side to point to American casualties or the insurgency and say “See? See? Look at the costs!” than it is for the pro-war side to point to a catastrophe that never happens because Uday Hussein is now dead. Yet clearly, the costs we’ve endured in Iraq so far would most likely be dwarfed by a successful mass casualty attack in the US. In terms of money, 9/11 cost the US five times as much as Iraq has cost so far, and after three years we’ve yet to reach the same number of casualties, although unfortunately we probably will. But compared to say, 25 thousand or more Angelenos dying of anthrax infection over a long weekend in 2009, and it becomes clear that maybe going to war in Iraq wasn’t such a bad idea after all.
Yada yada yada… Good Lord, when will you guys give up?
So they talked. So what? We’re talking to the Iranians right now, and the Russians, and the Chinese, and the … everyone.
Governments talk to lots of people all the time. The FACT, however, remains that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. Period. Unless you want to call the 9/11 commission a bunch of liars who should be tried for treason ‘cause they didn’t link Saddam to the WTC.
Give it up, losers.
1) You don’t know that, period.
2) It doesn’t much matter. We didn’t go in there looking for revenge.
This isn’t anything new. The 911 commission had this memo and the intelligence interpretation of it. It was a deal, but not an operational tie. Saddam agreed to let radical clerics say what they wanted in mosques (which would be a call to attack the US in Saudi Arabia) In exchange, Al Qaeda would stop trying to kill him.
Saddam had resisted letting this message get preached in mosques for many reasons. He did not want to piss off the US unless there was some advantage to be gained. Terrorist attacks against US targets in Saudi Arabia were counterproductive. They might prompt the US to leave, which they would only do if Saddam Hussein were deposed first. Even worse, there was a possiblity that they might destabilise the royal family’s grip on power. Hussein’s long term plan always involved HIM liberating the holy land from the Royals. If Saudi Arabia were seized by fundamentalists, he would not be able to take it himself.
Iraqi intelligence could hardly be expected to keep an honest record of the deal. It would make Saddam look like a chicken.