Wars and Rumors of . . . You Know
(retroactive) to invade Iraq will hug the news like a new, rare beanie baby; those holding out for evidence of a genuine Saddamist threat to the United States will yawn. I of course am in the latter camp. If you really want to kill someone, skip the mustard gas and get a gun.
The other “big” “news” is that the INC has a captured document showing that in the mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein offered to let Osama bin Laden broadcast anti-Saudi propaganda from Iraqi soil and explored the possibility of a more extensive operational relationship than that. A US intelligence task force says the document appears to be authentic. It’s an interesting bit of history, and it would be a worthwhile starting point for an investigation - if it came to your intelligence shop and you knew nothing else about the history of Iraqi-al Qaeda contacts, you would, as a responsible analyst or officer, go Hm, and start a probe. It dates from a period before bin Laden’s “declaration of war” against the US in 1998, though after early attacks since attributed to him. It dates from well before President Bush’s “al Qaeda mulligan,” which is not often enough remembered, in his famous speech of September 21 2001:
And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. (Applause.) From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.
The AQ mulligan was designed to let bygones be bygones with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and other countries, conditioned on future behavior. There appears to have been a silent “except Iraq” in the teleprompter text. Cutting that would have saved us a lot of trouble.
Nevertheless, if it were the first thing you saw, it should arouse suspicion and inspire a lot of digging. It’s not the first thing we’ve seen, though. There’s been quite a lot of digging. None of it has unearthed persuasive evidence that Iraq helped Al Qaeda attack the United States, either pre-mulligan or post. Everything that turns up is some variant of “we should have lunch sometime,” and all of it is old. From the perspective of today or even late 2001, it’s like finding old notes in someone’s grad school apartment clutter that got passed around about some high school crush. We keep hearing that so-and-so sort of likes so-and-so and is going to ask her out, but we never find the prom corsage, the tux rental slip or the used condoms.
Meanwhile, the new document, if authentic, casts a cold unflattering light on the Mylroie/Woolsey/March Hare thesis that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack. To the extent that that bomb was an Al Qaeda operation, the fact that, two or three years later, Iraqi intelligence and al Qaeda are still singing “Getting to Know You . . . ” tends to disconfirm Iraqi cooperation in that attack.
