March 28, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
Enemy of Our Enemy
By PETER BERGEN
Washington
BUSH administration defenders, right-wing bloggers and neoconservative
publications are crowing about Iraqi documents newly released by the
Pentagon that, they say, prove that Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein were in
league.
Even though the 9/11 commission found no "collaborative relationship"
between the ultrafundamentalist Osama bin Laden and the secular Saddam
Hussein, the administration's reiterations of a supposed connection —
Vice President ***** Cheney has argued that the evidence for such an
alliance was "overwhelming" — have convinced two out of three Americans
that they had "strong" links.
Some administration supporters have drawn an analogy to the 1939
Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, in which Stalin and Hitler put aside ideology
in favor of pragmatic goals (carving up the Baltic states, Poland and
Finland). But history is not a good guide here: not only was the
ideological divide between Al Qaeda and Baathist Iraq far greater than
that between the two 20th-century dictators, but unlike Nazi Germany and
the Soviet Union, the two sides had nothing practical to gain by working
together.
What do the new documents establish? According to ABC News's translation
of one of the most credible documents, in early 1995 Mr. bin Laden —
then living in Sudan — met with an Iraqi government representative and
discussed "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in
Saudi Arabia. The document also noted that the "development of the
relationship and cooperation between the two parties" was "to be left
according to what's open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement
on other ways of cooperation."
The results of this meeting were ... nothing. Two subsequent attacks
against American forces in Saudi Arabia — a car bombing that year and
the Khobar Towers attack in 1996 — were carried out, respectively, by
locals who said they were influenced by Mr. bin Laden and by the Saudi
branch of Hezbollah, a Shiite group aided by Iranian government officials.
As for the other new documents, there is one dated Sept. 15, 2001, that
outlines contacts between Mr. bin Laden and Iraq, but it is based on an
Afghan informant discussing a conversation with another Afghan. It is
third-hand hearsay.
And, strangely, another document, dated Aug. 17, 2002, from Iraq's
intelligence service explains there is "information from a reliable
source" that two Al Qaeda figures were in Iraq and that agents should
"search the tourist sites (hotels, residential apartments and rented
houses)" for them. If Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda had a relationship,
why was it necessary for Iraqi intelligence to be scouring the country
looking for members of the terrorist organization?
Another striking feature about the supposed Qaeda-Iraq connection is
that since the fall of the Taliban, not one of the thousands of
documents found in Afghanistan substantiate such an alliance, even
though Al Qaeda was a highly bureaucratic organization that required
potential recruits to fill out application forms.
All this goes to the central problem faced by proponents of the
Qaeda-Iraq connection. It's long been known that Iraqi officials were
playing footsie with Al Qaeda in the mid-1990's, but these desultory
contacts never yielded any cooperation. And why should they have? Al
Qaeda was able to carry out the embassy attacks in Africa in 1998, the
bombing of the destroyer Cole in 2000 and 9/11 with no help from Iraq.
The Iraqi intelligence services, for their part, could handle by
themselves low-level jobs like bumping off Iraqi dissidents abroad. And
after the botched attempt to assassinate former President George H. W.
Bush in Kuwait in 1993, Saddam Hussein never attempted terrorism against
an American target again.
We know, too, that Mr. bin Laden had long distrusted Saddam Hussein;
months before the Kuwait invasion in 1990 he angrily warned colleagues
that Iraq had designs on Persian Gulf states. He even offered his own
fighters to the Saudis in that war, making it clear that he yearned for
the "infidel" dictator to be overthrown.
If there was a method to Saddam Hussein's madness, it was that he wanted
to remain in power. Al Qaeda, however, wanted theocratic regime change
across the Middle East. In the end, their goals and worldviews were
diametrically opposed, and no number of sketchy intelligence documents
is going to bring them closer.
Peter Bergen, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is the author of
"The Osama bin Laden I Know: An Oral History of Al Qaeda's Leader."
.
|
