Word: baathist
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Osama bin Laden, and the Bush administration either “exaggerated” or outright lied about such a connection during the build-up to war. This assumption has become pervasive on talk shows and editorial pages. Indeed, many Democrats and liberal pundits speak as if the Baathist-al Qaeda connection had been conclusively refuted...
...Czech government still maintains that Mohammed Atta met with an Iraqi agent in Prague in April 2001). But the administration’s seeming timidity on the broader issue of pre-war links between Saddam and bin Laden is puzzling. To be sure, it is now indisputable that Baathist Iraq had some degree of contact with al Qaeda during much of the past 10 years. Those still not persuaded should consider all that’s emerged since the war began last March...
...Secret and Urgent” and dated Feb. 19, 1998—the day after President Clinton gave a major Pentagon speech on the danger posed by Saddam—contains a letter outlining a proposed visit by a bin Laden operative to Iraq from Sudan. Baathist officials hoped the trip would allow them “to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden.” And what would that “oral message” concern? According to the letter...
...jihad. The Pentagon apparently calculated that as the country settled down and its oil spigots opened and helped finance reconstruction, resistance would quickly be marginalized. Even after it became clear this summer that attacks on allied troops were intensifying, Rumsfeld described them as the exertions of a few Baathist "dead-enders." Yet a pair of Army studies published before the war cautioned that the goodwill of Iraqis would be fleeting and violent nationalism rife--that things, in short, could quickly become messy. "There were a lot of people in the Army who were aware of what the occupation might require...
...American soldiers should be standing guard duty at a children's hospital (where three G.I.s were killed in a grenade attack in July). That can be done by others and would free up the U.S. military to do what it does best: hunt down the remnants of the Baathist regime and confront their foreign terrorist allies...