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March 25, 2008
Iraqi Perspectives Project - Saddam and Terrorism - Tied to Terror
Over at National Review's military blog The Tank, Steve Schippert is taking the msm to task for their misreporting on the latest release by the Iraqi Perspectives Report, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents . As I discussed in my initial post on the report, much of the media was obsessing on a single sentence which supposedly "proved" that there was no connection between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda, and so by implication "Bush Lied" and the war is unjust.
From Schippert's post
It's no different from, nor unrelated to, the widely disseminated assertion that Saddam's Iraq had "no ties" to al-Qaeda. Both statements are bogus. Both are lazy. And both, more often than not, consciously or unconsciously, result from politically motivated preconceptions that are wrong but difficult to dispel in the minds of the irretrievably convinced...The job of distilling major reports that are too lengthy and time-consuming for most to digest in full still falls largely on the established media. Yet the media's sorry secret is that precious few among them do actually read and distill the major works, such as the recent Iraqi Perspectives Report. Most often, reporters scan the executive summary, latch onto a passage that fits their particular personal idiom, and craft a column peppered with almost random background notes and the names of the political figures of choice....
Here's a starting point. Before anyone writes another word on the Iraq Perspectives Project report, read it.
In fact you have to do is download and read the Executive Summary to know that 1) Saddam had many links to al Qaeda, even if they were informal ones, and 2) he was a major state sponsor of terror, because there are certainly more terrorist groups on this earth that al Qaeda.
But Schippert is certainly right about last December's National Intelligence Estimate. I downloaded and read it, and what I read bore little resemblance to media reports. See here and here. And I read in its entirety the original Iraqi Perspectives Report. Go to the sidebar under "Categories" and select "Iraqi Perspective Project" to see my chapter-by-chapter posts.
When it was first released only the Executive Summary was posted for downloading, and you had to order the rest as a 5 CD set. Due to public demand the United States Joint Forces Command has posted the whole thing online at the link above.
I haven't gone through it all yet, but today's Washington Times has an excellent editorial on it. Obviously they have actually read it.
Newly declassified documents captured in Iraq show that Saddam Hussein's regime had extensive ties with a variety of Islamist and other terrorist groups, in some cases dating back to the early 1990s. Saddam's Iraqi Intelligence Service (or Mukhabarat) established a working relationship with Egyptian Islamic Jihad, whose leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, later merged the group with al Qaeda, according to a new report by the Institute for Defense Analyses. In addition, the Mukhabarat trained scores of non-Iraqi Arabs to attack Israel. The new report contains copies of captured Iraqi documents that provide what may be the most detailed picture ever of Baghdad's support for terrorism.Few stories in recent memory have been as badly misreported by the mainstream media. News outlets -- including The Washington Post, the New York Times, CNN and ABC --all issued reports earlier this month declaring that the IDA report showed no link between Saddam and al Qaeda. While the report does say that there was no direct operational link between the two, its most significant new disclosure may be evidence of ties between Zawahri's EIJ and Saddam's regime. A 1993 memo from Iraqi intelligence to Saddam says that Iraq had aided the Egyptian group previously and was restarting contacts with the goal of overthrowing Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's government. Two other Iraqi memos included in the IDA report describe the EIJ's terrorist bona fides, including its assassination of President Anwar Sadat in 1981 and emphasize the importance of training and financing that group. Zawahri, who is believed to be in hiding with Osama bin Laden, is on the FBI's most-wanted-terrorism list for his role in the Sept. 11 attacks and the August 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
In fact, the al Qaeda connection only scratches the surface of Saddam's terrorist ties. As Rowan Scarborough reported in this newspaper on Friday, the IDA report reveals that Saddam provided millions of dollars and arms to Palestinian terror groups and trained Palestinians in Iraqi terror camps. Saddam's security service maintained representatives in the West Bank and Gaza, who met with Hamas founder Ahmad Yassin and conveyed his military needs to Baghdad. Another terrorist who found refuge in Baghdad was Abu Abbas, a leader of the Palestine Liberation Front, who engineered the 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro. The documents show that Abbas served as Saddam's conduit for meetings with Hamas. Coalition forces captured Abbas in 2003 as he attempted to flee to Syria. Abbas died of natural causes while in custody the following year.
The IDA report also includes translations of Iraqi Intelligence Service documents that describe efforts to destabilize other Arab governments, including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, and the regime's campaign to kill humanitarian aid workers operating in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq. The study also reveals that on Sept. 17, 2001, Saddam gave orders to his military intelligence directorate to recruit Iraqi officers to conduct "suicide operations" against the United States.
Posted by Tom at March 25, 2008 8:00 PM
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Comments
TRH,
For me, the fundamental issue remains as one of costs vs. benefits.
I think we may be at a crossroads in Iraq now. The gains of the surge were made possible, in part, to al Sadr's having his militia stand down which allowed us to concentrate on fighting AQM.
I do not know what will happene next but if large scale sectarian fighting occurs, whether it is factional or Shiite vs. Sunni, the progress we have made will be replaced by another problem, one which we may be ill equiped to address in places like Basra where the coalition presence is not strong.
Regads.
The Loop Garoo Kid
Posted by: Anonymous at March 26, 2008 12:34 PM
Hi Loop
There are lots of problems ahead of us, sectarian fighting, the one you mention, is one of them.
And one of the amazing things about this war is how little it has cost compared to our other wars, especially considering the great benefits to a stable Iraq that is at least somewhat pluralistic.
Posted by: Tom the Redhunter at March 26, 2008 7:24 PM
Tom,
If I have posted the follwing b/f on this site, I apologize, but I have always been extremely pessimistic about the prospects for democracy succeeding in Iraq.
It seems to me that none of the preconditions which allowed democracy to flourish in the United States, and elsewhere when we have have been successful in implementing it like post WW II Japan and Germany, are present in Iraq.
I do not believe that deomocracy has any chance in Iraq unless and until the Iraqis' loyalties shift primarily to their institutions of government and away from family, tribe, sect, or ethnic group. This shift will necessarily entail a reversal of cultural practices that have been in place for centuries.
Meanwhile, I have come to believe that not only is Gen. Petraeus the most able commander of his generation but also that he is the most able commander for the past several generations. On Tuesday I heard the end of a report on the radio that he may be shiftig to NATO and the internet seems to be abuzz w/ the story. Is there anything to it?
TLGK
Posted by: Anonymous at March 27, 2008 12:16 PM
No need to apologize, TLGK. It's a valid concern. And thank you for stopping by.
I've heard the same rumor about Petraeus but haven't had time to track it down.
You may be right about all the preconditions for democracy not being present in Iraq, but think you're being overly pessimistic.
Further (and I hate to sound Clintonian here!) it depends on what we mean by "democracy" for Iraq. Certainly we're not going to be able to create there what we did in Germany and Japan in anywhere near the time frame. I think most of us would consider it a success if they just had some sort of pluralistic society and voted in their leaders.
I agree that the conditions were there for Germany, but disagree about Japan. The place was socially very feudalistic and backwards.
Remember that Germany and Japan had the living tar beat out of them for years before we occupied them. We defeated the Iraqi Army in I think 5 weeks, leaving everyone stunned, especially those on the left who insisted we'd have a tough time of it (remember the "Battle of Baghdad" that never happened?).
The point is that Germany and Japan were so exhausted, and so many of their young men dead, that they were ready to acquiesce to whomever occupied them. With Iraq it was totally different. So while I understand your point about preconditions, and as I said you may end up being right, the fact that Germany and Japan were so devastated may have itself been a "precondition". Therefore, we may be overestimating the tribal loyalty factor.
Posted by: Tom the Redhunter at March 29, 2008 10:07 PM
Tom,
Germany did have a history of representative government after WW I so there was some experience upon which to build.
Meanwhile, Japan, in stark contrast to Iraq, was composed of a nearly homogeneous society that culturally, had obedience programmed into its individual members. Certainly there were other preconditions present there, but these two were primarily responsible for allowing the implementation of a completely different form of government than that country had known b/f.
TLGK
Posted by: Anonymous at March 30, 2008 10:48 AM
