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No Direct Operational Links

Between Saddam and al-Qaeda, according to a new Pentagon report. Despite hoopla, McClatchy notes debate unlikely to be affected. That’s because of Saddam’s indisputable support for terrorism, the fact that his regime had contacts with al-Qaeda, and because while some people consider that to be a highly dangerous scenario, others never will: 

The new study appears destined to be used by both critics and supporters of Bush’s decision to invade Iraq to advance their own familiar arguments.

While the documents reveal no Saddam-al Qaida links, they do show that Saddam and his underlings were willing to use terrorism against enemies of the regime and had ties to regional and global terrorist groups, the officials said.

However, the U.S. intelligence official, who’s read the full report, played down the prospect of any major new revelations, saying, “I don’t think there’s any surprises there.”

Saddam, whose regime was relentlessly secular, was wary of Islamic extremist groups such as al Qaida, although like many other Arab leaders, he gave some financial support to Palestinian groups that sponsored terrorism against Israel.

According to the State Department’s annual report on global terrorism for 2002 — the last before the Iraq invasion — Saddam supported the militant Islamic group Hamas in Gaza, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, a radical, Syrian-based terrorist group.

Saddam also hosted Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal, although the Abu Nidal Organization was more active when he lived in Libya and he was murdered in Baghdad in August 2002, possibly on Saddam’s orders.

An earlier study based on the captured Iraqi documents, released by the Joint Forces Command in March 2006, found that a militia Saddam formed after the 1991 Persian Gulf war, the Fedayeen Saddam, planned assassinations and bombings against his enemies. Those included Iraqi exiles and opponents in Iraq’s Kurdish and Shiite communities.

Other documents indicate that the Fedayeen Saddam opened paramilitary training camps that, starting in 1998, hosted “Arab volunteers” from outside of Iraq. What happened to the non-Iraqi volunteers is unknown, however, according to the earlier study.

The new Pentagon study isn’t the first to refute earlier administration contentions about Saddam and al Qaida.

A September 2006 report by the Senate Intelligence Committee concluded that Saddam was “distrustful of al Qaida and viewed Islamic extremists as a threat to his regime, refusing all requests from al Qaida to provide material or operational support.”

Maybe so. They were talking, though. Apparently a great deal. The extent of support for Zarqawi pre-2003 remains in dispute. Saddam may not have liked Islamists but he was a huge fan and substantial supporter of anti-Western terrorism.

Political football game begins.  Pentagon reportedly reversed course, opted not to release this, which seems silly at this point.

Carpetbagger: It ain’t the crime it’s the coverup. OK, it’s the Bush-lied crime, too.

Kevin Drum, CBS: as everyone but Stephen Hayes and Dick Cheney knew, no “serious” connection.

Depends what your definition of serious is, I suppose.  Saddam didn’t … maybe, not entirely clear, missing convoy to Syria … have any active WMD either. Absent sanctions, how long would that have lasted? Not long, his scientists said. It all comes down to a lot of known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, whatever other kind of knowns Rumsfeld identified at the time.  Known known: Saddam wanted to dominate the Middle East’s oil supplies, and would do anything he could to accomplish that.

Topics: Intel, Iraq

  Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:08 am on Thursday, March 13, 2008

5 Responses to “No Direct Operational Links”

1. RebeccaH Says:
   March 13th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

   They can haggle and argue all they like. The fact is, the old bastard’s dead and the Middle East is a slightly different place than it used to be.

2. Vanguard of the Commentariat Says:
   March 13th, 2008 at 8:47 pm

   There weren’t any direct operational links between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan either. But FDR went right after Mussolini in spite of the fact.

3. saltydog Says:
   March 13th, 2008 at 11:48 pm

   I suppose the questions are important if you completely ignore everything that happened in the area from 1991 on. Frankly, I thought that Iraq was strategically important; you don’t leave Saddam on your flank if you are going to take out the real enemy — Iran. You can point to who ever you want, but it has been Iran for 30 years. Had we attacked them in the beginning, I have a feeling that the “Arab street” would have continued the quietude displayed right after 9-11, when they weren’t sure how the Great Satan would respond. They weren’t quite sure we had completely lost the courage of moral certitude.

   We ought to have . . . well I started to say “blasted them back into the Middle Ages,” but that would have been an advancement. Since they are already living in an intellectual Dark Ages, perhaps it would have been enough to remove the knowledge and benefits of Western Civilization and render their choice of what to believe innocuous to us. As for the rest of the Middle East, there’s nothing like an object lesson to get someone’s attention.

4. Robert Says:
   March 14th, 2008 at 1:57 am

   “The connection, take 54″ posted on Powerline on March 13, 2008:

   “The Weekly Standard’s Steve Hayes is the man who wrote the book on The Connection between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. He also wrote the Standard article on “The connection.”

   “The Bush administration long ago gave up trying to tell the truth about the issue, as it has on so many others where it has been beaten into submission by the elite media. And so when the Pentagon recently released its 59-page report confirming Hayes’s reportage, the media have been left free to misrepresent it with impunity, as McClatchy’s Warren Strobel does here, as the New York Times blog does here, and as the ABC blog does here.”

5. MikeH Says:
   March 15th, 2008 at 2:55 am

   1) Have we managed to forget Halabja so quickly? (WMD)

   2) Saddam was a bad guy right in the middle of two other bad guys. Question: What was the association between Iran and al-Qaeda? There is one now! Would Iraq had to have fallen in order to take Iran anyway? Can anyone say with certainty?

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