On the war, updated
Maria sent me an article by Clifford D May A Justifiable, Necessary and Winnable War, in which May reminds us that
It is tempting to believe that – had we only left Saddam alone — he would have confined his atrocities to Iraqis and their neighbors, that he would have spared Americans. Overwhelming evidence contradicts that view
- In 1993, he attempted to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in Kuwait.
- In 1995, his son-in-law, Kamel Hussein, defected and revealed that he had secretly resumed his research on biological Weapons of Mass Destruction. (For that, Kamel paid with his life a year later.)
- In 1998, Saddam forced UN weapons inspectors to leave Iraq, having persistently refused to account for a list of prohibited WMD, including anthrax and sarin – the latter a deadly nerve gas, a dose of which was recently discovered in a roadside bomb in Baghdad. To this day, we don’t know what happened to those WMD – which is not the same as saying Saddam didn’t have them.
- In a May 2001 interview with PBS, Sabah Khadada, an Iraqi military officer who had been assigned to the Salman Pak terrorist training camp south of Baghdad, said that Saddam had personally told him and his colleagues: “We have to take revenge from America. Our duty is to attack and hit American targets. …That’s how Saddam was able to attract those [foreign] Arabs and Muslims who came to train, because that’s exactly what they want to do.”
- Among those foreign terrorists was Abu Musab al-Zarkawi, an Iraq-based associate of Osama bin Laden’s who in 2002 organized the assassination of American diplomat Lawrence Foley in Amman, Jordan (and a few weeks ago severed the head of American Nick Berg).
- Little by little, new evidence has been coming to light of an extensive web of Saddam-bin Laden ties. The best effort to untangle that web is Stephen F. Hayes’ new book: “The Connection: How al Qaeda’s Collaboration with Saddam Hussein has Endangered America.”
(you might want to read another May article Good news in Iraq).
Additionally, Iraqi Nuclear Gear Found in Europe, and there is evidence biological weapons; sarin and mustard gas shells have been found and destroyed.
Saddam had been sheltering two of the most notorious Palestinian terrorists: Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas. Abu Nidal (who supposedly commited suicide in Baghdad in 2002) might have had links with Atta. Abu Abbas masterminded the Achile Lauro hijaking was arrested last year. As Victor Davis Hanson explains,
There was a reason Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas were in Baghdad. And it was the same reason why al Qaeda was working in Kurdistan, why al Zarqawi went to Baghdad to Saddam’s doctors, why there is good reason to believe that before the first World Trade Center bombing the culpable terrorists had ties with Iraqi intelligence, and why seized documents now coming to light in Iraq reveal a long history of cooperation between Islamic terrorists and Saddam’s secret police. To think otherwise would be crazy, given the shared aims of both in attacking Americans and getting them out of the Middle East. The only puzzle is whether Saddam contributed to the 9/11 terrorist fund or simply was apprised of al Qaeda’s general efforts.
New evidence suggests that September 11 ringleader Mohamed Atta meet an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague five months earlier. Additional records further demonstrate Iraqi complicity in the September 11 massacre.
Still, I just received an email yesterday from a leftist friend who believes that we only left Saddam alone he would have spared Americans and there would be no terrorism threat anywhere. As Deroy Murdock puts it,
Absent surveillance footage of Saddam Hussein driving Mohamed Atta to Portland, Maine’s airport en route to American Airlines Flight 11, war critics and Bush bashers refuse to believe that Iraq’s deposed dictator might have been involved in 9/11.
As they say in Spanish, no hay peor ciego que el que no quiere ver (the blindest blind man is the man who doesn’t want to see).
Update NRO Interview of Stephen F. Hayes, via the Barcepundit
