Wrong whatever you do

Boing Boing: Bush could have gotten Zarqawi long ago

OK, this may not be new for some readers, but it is something I had either overlooked or have forgotten.

Boing Boing, which is good on pop culture but always liberal in any political post, notes the brief Salon article that points out that in 2002, before the Iraq invasion, Bush had a chance to take out an Al-Zarqawi camp in Northern Iraq, but chose not to.

The reasons given depend on the source. MSNBC said in 2004 it was because Bush did not want to take out a justification for invading Iraq. The ABC had a Four Corners relevant to this that I obviously missed. It reported a CIA agent as saying that the reason was that Bush did not want to appear to be a "gunslinger" while he was trying to build up French support for an invasion. Of course, most Salon and Boing Boing readers will take the first explanation over the second any day, even though if he had attacked the camp, it is pretty clear he would have been criticised.

Meanwhile, the Weekly Standard article referred to a couple of post ago has details from Colin Powell's speech (not contradicted according to Hayes) in which it was pointed out that although the camp itself was in a part of Iraq not fully controlled by Saddam, Zarqawi and associates were in the Sunni triangle in the lead up to the invasion. As Hitchens and others have pointed out, Iraq was not then the sort of place in which figures with a terrorist profile could get around without the State knowing.

What have we learned in the last 12 months? That Saddam liked to pretend even to his generals that he had WMD up his sleeve. That al Qaeda people, including Zarqawi, were not only in Northern Iraq setting up terrorist camps, but were also in the Sunni triangle.

Even in the (unlikely) event that Saddam had no knowledge or interest in al Qaeda in Iraq whatsoever, why is anyone surprised that the USA legitimately thought that if he had WMD (as he pretended to) he would be prepared to pass them onto al Qaeda?

UPDATE: I wrote the above before reading Hitchen's latest piece in Slate. (It's not the one that was reprinted in the Australian.) It is excellent stuff. An extract:

It is from this source [Jordan]that we know that Zarqawi was in Baghdad at least as early as June 2002, almost a year before the invasion. Indeed, as the Senate intelligence committee report has confirmed, it was in that month that the G.I.D. contacted the Saddam Hussein regime to "inform" the Iraqis that this very dangerous fellow was on their territory. Given the absolute police-state condition of Iraq at that time, it is in any case impossible to believe that such a person was in town, so to speak, incognito. And remember that in 2002, even states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were at least ostensibly expelling known al-Qaida members from their turf or else arresting them. Only Saddam's Iraq (—which did not reply to the Jordanian messages) —was tolerating and encouraging the presence of men who were on the run from Afghanistan.

It is customary to dismiss evidence of this kind with a brisk and pseudo-knowing sneer about the "secular" nature of Saddam's regime and thus its presumed incompatibility with theocratic fanatics. Quite how this CIA-sponsored "analysis" has survived this long is beyond me. At least from the time of its conclusion of hostilities with Iran, Baghdad became a center of jihadist propaganda and sponsorship. Saddam himself started to be painted and photographed wearing the robes of an imam. He began a gigantic mosque-building program. He financed the suicide-murderers who worked against the more secular PLO. He sent money to the Muslim separatists in the Philippines. His closest regional ally was the theocracy in Sudan, which had been the host of Osama Bin Laden.

As opposed to this, we have Phillip Adams in his column today saying this:

Zarqawi's death will not reduce terrorism in Iraq. It will, however, briefly endorse one of Bush's dubious justifications of his war - that alleged link between 9/11, Saddam and bin Laden. Al-Qa'ida arrived in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. The coalition gave them a red carpet. But despite disenchantment with Bush and his war, most US voters still believe their President's bizarre allegations that 9/11 was a double-act involving Saddam and bin Laden. And here's a trophy head to prove it.

This is rich. The Left is simply unable to point to any statement by Bush or his cohorts that that they believed Saddam was behind 7-11. Yet they still blame Bush for (apparently) a significant percentage of Americans believing a connection existed. (By the way, I would like to know the way that polling was done in some detail before getting too uptight about how smart the US public is.)

I have seen nothing at all in the Bush administration's reaction to last week's events to show they tried to use it to bolster an argument (a Saddam/9-11 connection) that they never made anyway. For Adams to claim that showing him dead "was a trophy head to prove it" is just ludicrous.

On the other hand, Adams and his cohorts continue repeating their memes ad naseum, encouraging the blind allegiance to allegations that are becoming increasingly discredited or (such as in the case of the suggestion that Bush misled the public on Saddam and 9-11,) outright lies.

The history of all this in 30 years time is not to going to read the way Adams expects.

UPDATE 2: Here's what the New Yorker says about it:

According to Iraq’s former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who claims that he discovered the information in the archives of the Iraqi secret service, Zarqawi travelled to Iraq in 1999, around the same time as Zawahiri. Saddam Hussein was courting Al Qaeda at the time. Inspired, perhaps, by Iran’s relationship with Hezbollah, he may have believed that he could use terrorists to conduct his foreign policy without undermining his rule. Contrary to Secretary of State Colin Powell’s assertion before the U.N. Security Council, in February, 2003, that Zarqawi provided the link to Al Qaeda in Iraq, bin Laden and Zawahiri spurned Saddam’s overtures.

Sources for that last bit of information would be...? I should go double check the Congressional inquiry again, I suppose.