Iraq and Al-Qaeda

Yesterday’s headlines about the 9/11 Commission hit the whole spectrum of awful journalism, but better reporting is starting to set the record straight. This AP report corrects the record about both President Bush’s pre-war claims and the Commission’s conclusions, and gives one the sense that the commissioners are backpedaling. Today, Kean and Hamilton are both saying that they don’t disagree with the administration’s view (there were contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda) which makes sense, given that the Commission concluded that Saddam’s senior intel operators met with AQ–even Osama himself–on multiple occasions:

A senior Iraqi intelligence officer reportedly made three visits to Sudan, finally meeting Bin Laden in 1994. Bin Laden is said to have requested space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but Iraq apparently never responded. There have been reports that contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda also occurred after Bin Laden returned to Afghanistan, but they do not appear to have resulted in a collaborative relationship. (emphasis mine)

So when the press reports this as “no contacts,” the real statement behind all that wishy-washy language is, “there were contacts, but we don’t really know who was there, how many, when, why, or where.” To conclude otherwise based solely on the denials of two senior AQs, you have to reach the implausible conclusion that Saddam spent all that money buying his top spies plane tickets to risky venues just to . . . express his complete lack of interest in further contacts. Of course, to send such senior spies abroad carries great risks that they will be seen, talk to foreign agents, or even defect. Something pretty important must have justified those risks. And since when are contacts between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden “mere” contacts? While Saddam’s enterprise was relatively diversified, Osama was exclusively engaged in terrorism. The subject of their discussions is always open speculation, but that speculation wouldn’t be terribly reasonable.

For a very detailed analysis of what the Commission said, what it failed to say, and the real story of Iraq’s connections to terrorism in general and AQ in particular, read this superb piece by Andrew McCarthy on NRO. McCarthy also details the evidence for a number of suspicious pre-9/11 meetings at which Iraq may have had a presence, plus a post-9/11 AQ presence in Baghdad itself. If you really don’t see the connections or the danger, don’t continue to deny them until you read the whole thing.

The most patently awful thing about some of the reporting of the Commission’s conclusion, however, was the way it stealthily recast Bush’s pre-war position on Iraq, terrorism, and the threat posed by their intersection. Was our concern Saddam’s involvement with 9/11 (there is some circumstantial evidence for that), his involvement with al-Qaeda (clear and convincing proof), his involvement in terrorism against us (here, proof beyond a reasonable doubt), his involvement with terrorism in general (ditto), his future potential to threaten us with terror (clearly, yes), or his future potential to threaten his neighbors and pin us down in that region for years (which he had done for decades), or the fact that notwithstanding any of that, AQ is most certainly in Iraq now and wants to make Iraq (or part of it) the next AQ haven? The media’s simplistic take is that it’s a multiple choice question, and that the only right answer is (a).