Dissecting Kerry's Errors on Iraq and al Qaeda
by Andrew Bissell
If there is one central theme to Sen. Kerry’s positions on the war, it is that the war in Iraq is a mistake and a distraction from the hunt for al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. This view of the War on Terror as a kind of focused, “tunnel vision” pursuit of al Qaeda — with the invasion of Iraq serving no purpose in fighting terrorists — is based on two popular errors in judgment that Kerry is now helping to perpetuate.
The first error is the conclusion that Saddam Hussein’s regime had no links to terrorists or to al Qaeda. The second is the mistaken conceit that the United States needs only to pursue those terrorists who are affiliated with the 9/11 hijackers, namely, members of al Qaeda. Kerry’s wholehearted embrace of these dangerous blunders raises serious doubts about his fitness for the position of Commander-in-Chief.
The claim that Saddam Hussein and his regime had no links to terror is a “truth” that has been manufactured by means of a “See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” consensus. It has been repeated ad nauseam in newspapers, talk shows and college classrooms to the point where it has taken on a kind of mythic unassailability.
Nowadays, to aver that Saddam had dealings with terrorists is to indulge in neoconservative apologism or mindless pro-American jingoism.
What was Saddam’s real policy on terror? He proudly and publicly paid rewards of $25,000 to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers. He gave safe haven to Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi national who took part in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
Then there were his ties (or his “connections,” or his “non-operation links,” or whatever you insist on calling them) to Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. The Clinton administration, in its indictment of bin Laden for the 1998 Kenya and Tanzania embassy bombings, stated that “al Qaeda reached an understanding with the Government of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government of Iraq.” The 9/11 Commission, often mischaracterized as having found no links between Saddam and al Qaeda, in fact reports that Iraqi intelligence officers met with al Qaeda terrorists in 1998 and “offered bin Laden a safe haven in Iraq.”
At this point, there is a convenient little argument trotted out to discredit any evidence of a Saddam-bin Laden link: Saddam was an ardent secularist, while bin Laden was an Islamic fundamentalist. Why, the two mixed about as well as water and oil! They would never have cooperated!
Consider, just for a moment, the absurdity of this notion: Saddam Hussein, a power-hungry dictator and thug, turning away potential terrorist allies out of deference to some higher philosophical principle of religious agnosticism. Uh-huh.
The truth is, Saddam was far more interested in nursing his grudge against the U.S. than in remaining aloof from religious matters. Take, for example, the murals he erected in celebration of the 9/11 attacks: one depicts Iraqi airliners slamming into skyscrapers; the other, Saddam himself smiling as the World Trade Center towers are consumed by flames. This was not the propaganda of a regime that wished to conscientiously dissociate itself from Islamic terrorism.
Even absent the Iraqi ties to bin Laden, however, there was still sufficient cause for invasion. Saddam’s links to other terrorists were a matter of public record. What’s more, almost the entire free world believed that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction, including the leaders of France and Germany. This had nothing to do with the Bush administration’s case for war. It was, rather, the result of intelligence failures and Saddam’s persistent obstruction of weapons inspectors, which in retrospect seems bizarre and downright suicidal.
True, al Qaeda is currently our most important foe in this war. But even after it is defeated, other militant Islamic groups will emerge to take its place if the real enemy — Islamic fundamentalism — has not been defeated. This is the Bush administration’s long-range objective; it is the reason we are in Iraq, and it is the critical insight that Kerry overlooks in his nearsighted fixation on al Qaeda.
In Hussein’s Iraq, the United States confronted a nation that was cozy with terrorists, had tried to assassinate one of our former presidents, took frequent potshots at our pilots as they enforced no-fly zones, acted in bad faith at every turn, and — we had every reason to believe — possessed WMDs. The toppling of that regime is not a “distraction,” and the only “colossal error in judgment” is the one John Kerry makes every time he says that it is.
This article first appeared in the Montana Kaimin on October 5, 2004.
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