The argument from those who wanted to see America stand down from the Iraq invasion as the US military began its build up around Iraq in late 2002, almost completely relied on the logic that radical Islamic entities such as al Qa'eda would never work with secularist states such as Saddam's Ba'athist Iraq. WMD aside, I think the Bush administration dropped the ball on the Iraq invasion rally cry based on the justification. Most people can't bring themselves to remember the debate but I sure can. I can remember the war was titled "The war against terrorism". At no time was it ever "The war against WMDs." While it is too late to rejustify invading the state of Iraq (against the will of the UN), one can correct the revisionists who today insist the invasion didn't help in the overall campaign.

WMDs were used by Saddam Hussein on numerous occasions and he certainly did play shell games and many others with UN inspectors providing the appearance of someone hiding something substantial. The frustrating thing for me though was the fact that Cheney and Bush were emphasizing WMD programs and not linking Saddam's terrorist proxies and beneficiaries. It is these relationships which should have been hammered into the debate in the UN and on Main Street USA.

According to the US State Department, Saddam had been providing shelter, safe-haven, funding and or training to no less than seven terrorist organizations responsible for wounding ninety-one Americans and the deaths of thirty-six more. The Palestine Liberation Front, Hamas, Abu Nidal, Ansar al Islam, Kurdistan Workers Party, Arab Liberation Front and Mujahiden e Khalk (MEK).

 

To this point we haven't uttered any link between al Qa'eda and Saddam Hussein and the effort to suppress this stealth relationship was effective but not unimpeachable. Prior to September 11, 2001 there were many articles and state department releases that painted a different picture than the one Saddam, France's Chirac, American liberals and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wanted the world to focus on:



1) United Press International

. November 3, 1999, Wednesday, BC cycle.

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. government has tried to prevent accused terror suspect Osama bin Laden from fleeing Afghanistan to either Iraq or Chechnya, Michael Sheehan, head of counter-terrorism at the State Department, told a Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee ...

2) The Kansas City Star. March 2, 1999, Tuesday.

International terrorism, a conflict without boundaries

By Rich Hood

... He (bin Laden) has a private fortune ranging from $250 million to $500 million and is said to be cultivating a new alliance with Iraq's Saddam Hussein, who has biological and chemical weapons bin Laden would not hesitate to use. An alliance between bin Laden and Saddam Hussein could be deadly. Both men are united in their hatred for the United States and any country friendly to the United States....

3) National Public Radio (NPR)
MORNING EDITION (10:00 AM on ET)
February 18, 1999.

THOUGH AFGHANISTAN HAS PROVIDED OSAMA BIN LADEN WITH SANCTUARY, IT IS UNCLEAR WHERE HE IS NOW.
ANCHORS: BOB EDWARDS
REPORTERS: MIKE SHUSTER

... There have also been reports in recent months that bin Laden might have been considering moving his operations to Iraq. Intelligence agencies in several nations are looking into that. According to Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of CIA counterterrorism operations, a senior Iraqi intelligence official, Farouk Hijazi(ph), sought out bin Laden in December and invited him to come to Iraq.

Mr. VINCENT CANNISTRARO (Former Chief of CIA Counterterrorism Operations): Farouk Hijazi, who was the Iraqi ambassador in Turkey ... known through sources in Afghanistan, members of Osama's entourage let it be known that the meeting had taken place.

SHUSTER: Iraq's contacts with bin Laden go back some years, to at least 1994, when, according to one U.S. government source, Hijazi met him when bin Laden lived in Sudan. According to Cannistraro, Iraq invited bin Laden to live in Baghdad to be nearer to potential targets of terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. There is a wide gap between bin Laden's fundamentalism and Saddam Hussein's secular dictatorship. But some experts believe bin Laden might be tempted to live in Iraq because of his reported desire to obtain chemical or biological weapons. CIA director George Tenet referred to that in recent testimony....

4) San Jose Mercury News (California). February 14, 1999 Sunday MORNING FINAL EDITION

U.S. WORRIED ABOUT IRAQI, BIN LADEN TIES TERRORIST COULD GAIN EVEN
DEADLIER WEAPONS

U.S. intelligence officials are worried that a burgeoning alliance between terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein could make the fugitive Saudi's loose-knit organization much more dangerous ...

In addition, the officials said, Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal is now in Iraq, as is a renowned Palestinian bomb designer, and both could make their expertise available to bin Laden.

"It's clear the Iraqis would like to have bin Laden in Iraq," said Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counterterrorism operations at the Central Intelligence Agency ...

Saddam has even offered asylum to bin Laden, who has expressed support for Iraq.

... (in) late December, when bin Laden met a senior Iraqi intelligence official near Qandahar, Afghanistan, there has been increasing evidence that bin Laden and Iraq may have begun cooperating in planning attacks against American and British targets around the world.

Bin Laden, who strikes in the name of Islam, and Saddam, one of the most secular rulers in the Arab world, have little in common except their hatred of the United States ...

More worrisome, the American officials said, are indications that there may be contacts between bin Laden's organization and Iraq's Special Security Organization (SSO), run by Saddam's son Qusay. Both the SSO and the Mukhabarat were involved in a failed 1993 plot to assassinate former President George Bush ...

"The idea that the same people who are hiding Saddam's biological weapons may be meeting with Osama bin Laden is not a happy one," said one American official....

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=8887

 

There are many more to copy and paste but hopefully I've demonstrated enough for you. More evidence of collaboration between Saddam and bin Laden's al Qa'eda contradicts conventional wisdom and is a bit more murky but bears the responsible investigator to consider the information. July 21, 2001 al Nasiriyah newspaper, *a Ba'athist publication in Baghdad, made this remarkable prediction in typical Arab flowery fashion:

" America says, admitting just like a bird in the midst of a tornado, that Bin Ladin is behind the bombing of its destroyer in Aden. The fearful series of events continues for America and the terror within America gets to the point that the Governor of Texas increases the amount of the award, just as the stubbornness of the other man and his challenge increases. This challenge makes it such that one of his grandchildren comes from Jeddah traveling on the official Saudi Arabia airlines and celebrates with him the marriage of one of the daughters of his companions. Bin Ladin has become a puzzle and a proof also, of the inability of the American federalism and the C.I.A. to uncover the man and uncover his nest. The most advanced organizations of the world cannot find the man and continues to go in cycles in illusion and presuppositions. They still hope that he could come out from his nest one day, they hope that he would come out from his hiding hole and one day they will point at him their missiles and he will join Guevara, Hassan Abu Salama, Kamal Nasser, Kanafani and others. The man responds with a thin smile and replies to the correspondent from Al Jazeera that he will continue to be the obsession and worry of America and the Jews, and that even that night he will practice and work on an exercise called ``How Do You Bomb the White House.'' And because they know that he can get there, they have started to go through their nightmares on their beds and the leaders have had to wear their bulletproof vests.

Meanwhile America has started to pressure the Taliban movement so that it would hand them Bin Ladin, while he continues to smile and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House .....

The phenomenon of Bin Ladin is a healthy phenomenon in the Arab spirit. It is a decision and a determination that the stolen Arab self has come to realize after it got bored with promises of its rulers: After it disgusted itself from their abomination and their corruption, the man had to carry the book of God and the Kalashnikov and write on some off white paper ``If you are unable to drive off the Marines from the Kaaba, I will do so.'' It seems that they will be going away because the revolutionary Bin Ladin is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting. That the man will not be swayed by the plant leaves of Whitman nor by the ``Adventures of Indiana Jones'' and will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs."

 

Obviously all three 911 targets are mentioned here. The White House (target of flight #93 which was hijacked and crashed in the now famous struggle between the hijackers and passengers), the Pentagon both by name and the promise that OBL would "strike the arm that is already hurting" (Strike at the WTC which was already bombed in 1993)and OBL would "curse the memory of Frank Sinatra (New York, New York)". While this doesn't prove any Iraq collaboration with Osama in the 911 plot, it does provide a suspicious glimpse into how well known the mission was within Iraq.

OK, so enough of Modern History 101. The meat and potatos of this article is to defuse forever the anti- Iraq war theory that Islamic radicals and secularist states "would never work together against America". A picture is worth a thousand words?