Calling Their Shots

The ever-elusive Osama bin Laden has just released a new tape to al Jazeera in which he calls Iraq the "perfect base to set up the jihad to liberate Palestine."

I'm putting the over/under on days it takes John McCain or the administration to completely misinterpret history and use this as a reason our occupation of Iraq is necessary at two.

While anyone with a basic understanding of history and the region will instantly understand that said base was created by the United States and that as long as foreign forces occupy their soil there will be no peace.

As long as Saddam was in power, bin Laden utilizing Iraq as a jumping-off point would have been impossible. It is only into the vacuum created by the US forces that al Qaeda or other groups can slip into. One need only recall how bin Laden obtained the position he's in in the first place. The United States helped drive the Russians out of Afghanistan in the '80s and the Taliban filled the vacuum, creating a safe harbor for terrorism and bin Laden.

Yet, the President and his cronies don't see things in that light. They refuse to acknowledge the correlation between the US occupation and the insurgency. To them, that one is the root cause of the other is sacrilege. Instead, they continue to insist that we must stay until the insurgency comes to a halt, illustrating a willfully-blind belief that cessation is possible without vacation.

In that light, I give the administration or John McCain-whichever strikes first-two days at most to say something to the effect of, "just the other day, bin Laden himself said that Iraq would make a good base for terrorism against our friends and allies. We must not let that happen." And no one will stand up and point out that that sanctuary was created by the same people who decry its existence.

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The Missing Link

The lead up to the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 was rife with contradictions, misdirection, pandering to innate fears and outright misrepresentation of facts. As the Bush administration reluctantly tried to give an air diplomacy and present a forthright case for war, it ran through an almost-slapstick comedy of errors and erratic ricochets between various attempted justifications for invasion. Five years on, it has become increasingly clear that the justifications were largely a publicity stunt undertaken begrudgingly by an administration that fells it answers to no one and continues to trade in aggregate deception and rhetorical misdirection.

Among the various reasons for invasion given by the Bush administration were the existence of WMDs in Iraq, the intolerable oppression of the Iraqi people, numerous violations of UN resolutions by Saddam (of course, in this instance the UN was seen as legitimate by Bush), and a baseless allegation of a formal connection between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime. The failure to find any WMDs has been widely documented. That the United States is close allies with plenty of oppressive Islamic regimes (read: Saudi Arabia) became a cumbersome reality when testing the waters with that line of reasoning. The public disdain for the UN by the administration made its sudden reliance upon it seem more than a little disingenuous.

What's left but to conflagrate a fear in the American people that the man responsible for the death of thousands on September 11, 2001 was still in power and capable of even more. Bereft of evidence for its case, the administration relied on empty rhetoric and deceptive end-runs around the intelligence community.

September 2001: The Pentagon creates the Office of Special Plans "in order to find evidence of what [Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul] Wolfowitz and his boss, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, believed to be true-that Saddam Hussein had close ties to Al Qaeda, and that Iraq had an enormous arsenal of chemical, biological, and possibly even nuclear weapons that threatened the region and, potentially, the United States� The rising influence of the Office of Special Plans was accompanied by a decline in the influence of the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. bringing about a crucial change of direction in the American intelligence community." The office, hand-picked by the Administration, specifically "cherry-picked intelligence that supported its pre-existing position and ignoring all the rest" while officials deliberately "bypassed the government's customary procedures for vetting intelligence."

As other justifications were knocked aside by overt reality, the administration gravitated to others, such as the installation of democracy, but still held on to its insistence that there was a link between Saddam and Osama bin Laden. Really, they had to keep up the charade as they still do in order to lump Operation Iraqi Freedom in with the larger War on Terror. This singular claim is all the administration has in its arsenal to claim that the Iraq war was part of, and not a distraction from, the war against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

Enter the recently-released (well, sort of) report on the accounting of 600,000 Iraqi documents captured from the deposed regime which concludes that there was in fact no formal relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and certainly no active involvement by Saddam's regime in the attack on the World Trade center. It is important to note, because it will be seized upon by the right, that the report absolutely does not suggest that Saddam did not have links to terror. Much of the Iraq Perspective Project's report detailed the various and widespread terrorist groups supported by Saddam both with money and training. It also illustrates the overarching structure surrounding the program. To take away from this report that Saddam and terror were strangers would take an enormous suspension of literacy on the part of the reader.

What the report does say is that Saddam's association with terror was regional in nature and concentrated around achieving his own political aims. Moreover, the report states that the most frequent target of his terrorism were Iraqis, both at home and abroad. Cooperation with groups tied to bin Laden (who had several front groups other than al Qaeda) was undertaken by Iraq insofar as "that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision." So, essentially, Saddam's not going to shy away from supporting an al Qaeda front group if they want to bomb American or Israeli targets in the region or disrupt oil exports, but this support was almost entirely monetary in nature and somewhat tacit. It was not in any way long-term collaboration on a project the size and scale of the WTC attack.

Speaking of a long-term relationship between bin Laden and Hussein, the IPP states:

Both wanted to create a single powerful state that would take its place as a global superpower.

But the similarities ended there: bin Laden wanted-and still wants to-restore the Islamic caliphate while Saddam, despite his later Islamic rhetoric, dreamed more narrowly of being the secular ruler of a united Arab nation. These competing visions made any significant long-term compromise between them highly unlikely. After all, to the fundamentalist leadership of al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst kind of "apostate" regime-a secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges.

Considerable operational overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the regional groups involved in terrorism. Saddam provided training and motivation to revolutionary pan-Arab nationalists in the region...That these movements (pan-Arab and pan-Islamic) had many similarities and strategic parallels does not mean
they saw themselves in that light.

Empasis mine

If it had characterized the relationship between al Qaeda and Iraq as a fleeting one borne of a common enemy in the United States, the Bush administration would be correct in its assertions and this report wouldn't be getting the press it's receiving. But that isn't the case they've made.

In order to rope Iraq under the War on Terror umbrella, the administration has baldly claimed that Hussein played a significant role in the planning and execution of the 2001 attack, and that is a position which is impossible to undertake given the documents reviewed for the IPP's publication. It's important to realize that the basis for the writings are primary sources from Saddam's own regime and not intelligence reliant upon un-vetted or biased sources.

One would expect that the release of this information will not be accompanied by a lowering in the tone of the rhetoric coming out of the White House. Quite to the contrary, it has already elicited a defensive response customary to the administration marked by refusing to release the report online and launching a PR campaign in the hopes of downplaying or outright mis-characterizing its conclusions. But there is no mistaking the obvious. The Bush administration's case for war in Iraq was based entirely on an endless stream of empty rhetoric backed by a brazen mis-representation of facts and outright lies. That they still cling to dis-proven tenets of a false pretext should surprise no one but enrage all.

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