Word: saddamism
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...Clark's account squares with a CBS report last fall suggesting that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld had urged his aides to begin making the case for striking Saddam as well as bin Laden within hours of the attacks. And media reports from the time suggested that by late September of 2001 Administration hawks were pressing for an attack on Iraq, while doves led by Secretary of State Powell were narrowing the focus to bin Laden and Afghanistan...
...reason so many hawks seemed ready to make the case for retaliating against Saddam as well as bin Laden may have been the influence of Laurie Mylroie, a conservative scholar who had convinced herself - and a number of influential conservatives, although not the U.S. intelligence community - that Iraq had been behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and was very likely behind 9/11, too. But as eccentric as her argument was to the U.S. intelligence community, it was hailed by Wolfowitz, who wrote in a blurb to her book that it "argues powerfully that the mastermind of the 1993 World...
...says, is an invention of wussy Clintonites afraid to make war on state sponsors. But as Perle says, her hypotheses can be tested: Presumably, if al-Qaeda was a front for Iraqi intelligence, and such groups need a state behind them to commit transnational terror, then the fact that Saddam's regime no longer exists would presumably leave us safe from al-Qaeda. Need I say more...
...More important than the fate of Mylroie's scholarship now that Saddam is gone but al-Qaeda continues to haunt us is the question of why the Administration placed such a strong emphasis on the purported Iraq-al-Qaeda link when it appears to have been at odds with the assessment of the U.S. intelligence community. The National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq recently released by the administration to back up its case on the "yellowcake" uranium allegations says the intelligence services did not believe it was likely that Saddam would share his weapons of mass destruction with al-Qaeda, except...
...dispute - European interrogations of some of his subordinates suggest he was running a rival group. Ansar al-Islam certainly had links to al-Qaeda, but there is little to suggest that the group, which operated in the northeast of the country where the allied no-fly zone prevented Saddam from exercising control, had any links with Baghdad. And the reports of the meetings between Iraq and al-Qaeda also suggest that bin Laden had declined to pursue a relationship with the secular dictator. Reports of the interrogations of the most senior captive al-Qaeda men also suggest that they deny...