No Wonder Libs Are Upset - The Surge Is Working

[CTRLALTDEL]

Al Qaeda is a minor irritant in Iraq whose job is to keep stirring the pot. The real fight is between sunnis and shiites. The real fight is a civil war that saw 34K Iraqi civilians killed last year alone.

If America suffered 260 THOUSAND dead civilians** last year due to sectarian violence, who wouldn't call THAT a civil war?

And why are we in the middle of a civil war where both sides consider us intruding enemies?


**(do the math: 34K dead in a population of 26M extrapolated to a US population of 301M)

True. Al Qaida is just taking advantage of the Sunni/Shiite hatred. And I'm sure they are the ones attacking one side in hoping the other would retaliate in a deadly manner. DIVIDE AND CONQUER.

 

[red states rule]

True. Al Qaida is just taking advantage of the Sunni/Shiite hatred. And I'm sure they are the ones attacking one side in hoping the other would retaliate in a deadly manner. DIVIDE AND CONQUER.

You might want to tell Sn Fran Nan and the 9-11 Commission they are minor (see post # 20)

You must have better information then they have - or is just more moonbat talking points?

 

[red states rule]

True. Al Qaida is just taking advantage of the Sunni/Shiite hatred. And I'm sure they are the ones attacking one side in hoping the other would retaliate in a deadly manner. DIVIDE AND CONQUER.

Divide and conquer seems to be what libs want to do with America

Libs are starting to stake out their anti war and anti military platform for the 08 election



Democrats in '08 race battle over anti-war vote
By Donald Lambro

The race for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination has turned almost entirely into a contest over who has the toughest and most credible plan to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq.
Now, the front-runners are adjusting their positions and escalating their rhetoric in an all-out battle for support among anti-war Democratic voters in January's early caucus and primary states.
"Basically, the race is on for the hearts and minds of the majority of Democratic primary voters who oppose the war, and that's what you see happening now," said campaign consultant Bud Jackson, who produces TV ads for Democratic candidates.
In Iowa, for example, where the nation's first presidential caucuses take place, "it's the major issue with core Democrats," said Rob Tully, the state's former Democratic chairman.
Among the top contenders, no one has had more political difficulty with the issue than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who until recently has opposed proposals from within her party to set a deadline for withdrawing U.S. combat forces from Iraq. She opposed President Bush's plan to send additional troops to Iraq, and instead favored keeping the current level of forces there.
But with her presidential-preference polls in decline, she abruptly adjusted her position last week, deciding to support legislation the Senate approved Thursday that would begin phased troop withdrawals within four months, "with the goal" of pulling all combat forces out of Iraq by March 31, 2008.
Mrs. Clinton's strategists said she concluded the term "goal" did not set an absolute deadline for troop withdrawal, a move that she has said was "not smart strategy" to defeat insurgents in Iraq.
Her midcourse correction also came after her chief rival for the nomination, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, escalated his opposition to the war during a campaign stop in Iowa.
"We're in the midst of a war that should never have been authorized," Mr. Obama said in Dubuque. During the campaign stop, his staff distributed the text of a speech Mr. Obama gave in 2002 as a state senator denouncing the U.S.-led war.
"I think it's a contrast between me and the other candidates," he told the Des Moines Register. "I have consistently believed this war was not just a problem of execution, but was a problem of conception."
His remarks were seen as stepped-up criticism of Mrs. Clinton and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards, the party's 2004 vice presidential nominee, both of whom voted for the Senate resolution authorizing the war. Mrs. Clinton has refused calls to admit her vote was a mistake or to apologize for it, while Mr. Edwards has renounced his vote and called it the worst vote he cast in the Senate.
Mr. Tully, who is backing Mr. Edwards, said Mr. Obama's decision to fire up his anti-war attacks on his rivals "is a very smart move."

"That's a challenge for Hillary to overcome that," he said.
Mrs. Clinton held a narrow lead in the national polls last week, but in Iowa, Mr. Edwards was leading the pack with his calls for a withdrawal of all troops within 12 months -- a position that receives standing ovations from Democratic audiences. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama were in a virtual dead heat for second place.
"In a multi-candidate field, you try to differentiate your position from the others. This is one issue where Obama feels he has a better record," said Mr. Jackson, the campaign consultant.
"He's trying to stake out the claim that he is the true anti-war Democrat and has never wavered. He's trying to drive a wedge between his position on the war and Hillary's," he said.

http://www.washtimes.com/national/20...4643-9437r.htm

 

[red states rule]

Veterans, Others Denounce Marchers
Counter-Demonstrators Number in Thousands

By Brigid Schulte
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 18, 2007; Page A12

As war protesters marched toward Arlington Memorial Bridge en route to the Pentagon yesterday, they were flanked by long lines of military veterans and others who stood in solidarity with U.S. troops and the Bush administration's cause in Iraq. Many booed loudly as the protesters passed, turned their backs to them or yelled, "If you don't like America, get out!"

Several thousand vets, some of whom came by bus from New Jersey, car caravans from California or flights from Seattle or Michigan, lined the route from the bridge and down 23rd Street, waving signs such as "War There Or War Here." Their lines snaked around the corner and down several blocks of Constitution Avenue in what organizers called the largest gathering of pro-administration counter-demonstrators since the war began four years ago.

The vets turned both sides of Constitution into a bitter, charged gantlet for the war protesters. "Jihadists!" some vets screamed. "You're brain-dead!" Others chanted, "Workers World traitors must hang!" -- a reference to the Communist newspaper. Some broke into "The Star-Spangled Banner" as war protesters sought to hand out pamphlets.

"Bunch of hooligans in motorcycle jackets!" one war protester shot back.

The large turnout surprised even some counter-demonstrators. Polls show public opinion turning against the war in Iraq, and the November election was widely seen as a repudiation of the administration's policy.

"I've never been to a war rally. I hoped I'd never have to," said Jim Wilson, 62, a Vietnam vet from New Hampshire. "We're like what they used to call the silent majority."

In some past antiwar rallies, the number of counter-demonstrators has ranged from a handful to a few hundred. "Our side got apathetic," said Debby Lee, whose son Marc, a Navy SEAL, was killed in Iraq and who came to the rally from Phoenix in a caravan organized by MoveAmericaForward.org.

But the war protesters have gone too far, Lee and others said. At a Jan. 27 antiwar rally, some protesters spray-painted the pavement on a Capitol terrace. Others crowned the Lone Sailor statue at the Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue with a pink tiara that had "Women for Peace" written across it.

Word of those incidents ricocheted around the Internet.

"That was the real catalyst, right there," said Navy veteran Larry Bailey. "They showed they were willing to desecrate something that's sacred to the American soul."

Well before 7 a.m., hundreds of people milled about near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in an effort to, they said, "occupy the ground" and keep any disrespectful war protesters away.

"This is sacred ground to us," said Rick De Marco, 62, a Vietnam veteran from Cleveland.

K.C. O'Brien, 65, a Vietnam vet from Fairfield, Calif., said: "We believe in freedom of speech. We're here to defend the right of people to say whatever they want. But we will not allow any desecration."

Within days of the spray-painting, people were using he Web to organize, making it their mission to protect the monuments, support the troops and accept nothing less than victory in Iraq.

Gathering of Eagles, the group that organized the protest, was so worried about threats to the monuments that it hired private security to guard the Wall, said Harry Riley, 69, a retired Army colonel from Florida. Other vets patrolled the area through the night and early morning, he said.

By early morning, the National Park Service had installed two metal detectors and carefully controlled entry along the path leading to the Wall. Blue-helmeted riot police were stationed along the length of the Wall. For a time, a handful of vets paraded back and forth with American flags waving in the stiff, cold breeze.

By 2 p.m., with the war protesters across the Potomac River, the metal detectors had come down. The path along the Wall was quiet as the occasional veteran paused at the name of someone remembered.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/17/AR2007031701280.html?sub=new

 

[red states rule]

Al Qaeda is a minor irritant in Iraq whose job is to keep stirring the pot. The real fight is between sunnis and shiites. The real fight is a civil war that saw 34K Iraqi civilians killed last year alone.

If America suffered 260 THOUSAND dead civilians** last year due to sectarian violence, who wouldn't call THAT a civil war?

And why are we in the middle of a civil war where both sides consider us intruding enemies?


**(do the math: 34K dead in a population of 26M extrapolated to a US population of 301M)

Dismissing Signs of Progress, ABC, NBC Paint Dismal Portrait of Iraq
Posted by Mark Finkelstein on March 18, 2007 - 09:12.
Keying off the fourth anniversary of the Iraq war this Tuesday, the networks will be running overviews of the situation there all week. Judging by the opening salvos this morning on ABC and NBC, you might when tuning in want to hide the sharp objects and keep the Zoloft handy. The picture painted is ceaselessly dismal, with any bright spots ignored or explained away.

Take the report by ABC's Terry McCarthy on today's Good Morning America. After citing weekend casualty statistics, he began by claiming that "now more than ever" Iraqis are nervous about the future of their country. According to McCarthy, "the sound of bombings and gunfire are constant backdrops to everyday life." Constant? Really? I daresay that in the great majority of the country, people rarely hear either. Even in hotspots like Baghdad, while such sounds are not unusual, neither are they "constant" by any means.

One challenge for the MSM is explaining away the largely peaceful and prosperous Kurdish north. McCarthy did his unlevel best: "even in northern Iraq's Kurdish region, which is relatively peaceful, the fight to keep terrorists out takes up a lot of time and energy. The Kurds dug a six-foot ditch all around the largest city, Irbil, to stop car bombs from entering."

After a bleak assessment of the Iraqi economy, and more on the security situation, McCarthy concluded: "Iraqis are learning how to survive like this. But it is eating away at their souls." ABC News: your official surveyor of souls.

Note that McCarthy excluded reference to the encouraging developments in recent weeks, or to the progress toward democracy Iraq has made. Over on "Today" this morning, reporter Tom Aspell, doing a similar overview, did mention the steps toward democracy -- but only for purposes of dismissing them. After reciting a litany of woe compararable to McCarthy's, he continued:

"There have been two nation-wide elections, and a constitutional referendum. The country now has a free press, and dozens of political parties. But it means little to Iraqis when there's no security; two-thirds of them believe the situation is worsening."

It's not clear what poll Aspell was relying on, but when GMA cited similar findings, it acknowledged that the poll had been taken before the current surge, which has been yielding hopeful, if still early, signs of success.

Compare and contrast with the poll cited in this Times of London article today, Iraqis: life is getting better, which found that "most Iraqis believe life is better for them now than it was under Saddam Hussein, according to a British opinion poll published today. The survey of more than 5,000 Iraqis found the majority optimistic despite their suffering in sectarian violence since the American-led invasion four years ago this week." H/t reader paulnashtn.

Predictably, neither McCarthy nor Aspell cited that poll or its findings.

The situation in Iraq is difficult and too-often deadly. But much of the country is largely peaceful and there are indications the new policies may be yielding positive results. But since that doesn't fit the MSM script, it is ignored or explained away. Moreover, does not Aspell insult Iraqis in suggesting they don't believe freedom and democracy are worth sacrificing for?

Mark was in Iraq in November. Contact him at [email protected]

http://newsbusters.org/node/11486

 

[CTRLALTDEL]

You might want to tell Sn Fran Nan and the 9-11 Commission they are minor (see post # 20)

You must have better information then they have - or is just more moonbat talking points?

SADDAM HAD AL QAIDA UNDER CONTROL IN IRAQ UNTIL WE OPENED UP THE FLOODGATES WITH OUR MACHO GUNGHO YAHOO MONKEY INVASION.

 

[red states rule]

SADDAM HAD AL QAIDA UNDER CONTROL IN IRAQ UNTIL WE OPENED UP THE FLOODGATES WITH OUR MACHO GUNGHO YAHOO MONKEY INVASION.

so now Saddam was a good dictator? he had many ties to terrorist groups and was funding terrorists activities

 

[CTRLALTDEL]

so now Saddam was a good dictator? he had many ties to terrorist groups and was funding terrorists activities

Nobody said he was a good/nice dictator. But we had one thing in common with him.....HATRED FOR RADICAL ISLAMIC MILITANTS (he was secular after all). He was also an enemy of Iran and OSAMA. Someone on this board once said that the reasons for keeping Saddam in power was greater than the number of reasons to remove him.

Yes he may have funded PALESTINIAN families for thier suicide bombings. But he was just pissed at the way the Jews were treating the Palestinians.

 

[red states rule]

Nobody said he was a good/nice dictator. But we had one thing in common with him.....HATRED FOR RADICAL ISLAMIC MILITANTS (he was secular after all). He was also an enemy of Iran and OSAMA. Someone on this board once said that the reasons for keeping Saddam in power was greater than the number of reasons to remove him.

Yes he may have funded PALESTINIAN families for thier suicide bombings. But he was just pissed at the way the Jews were treating the Palestinians.

So if he "hated" radical Islamic militants, why are there so many links between Saddam, his Secet Police, and al Qaeda?

 

[LuvRPgrl]

So 17 US troops killed is cause for you to cheer??

Typical liberal. Distort the opposistions posistion then attack. RSR isnt happy 17 died, he is happy the number is declining.

I have a link to a yahoo photo that seems to dispute your claim, but I am not yet privileged to post links on this forum.

Now that you make the claim that the surge is working in your educated opinion, then I expect that you will not see any need to escalate beyond this point. I expect that you will oppose all future calls for more escalations, surges, piling on the cannon fodder, etc. Any future increases should be met by calling back the coalition members (such as the British) that have pulled out, right?

You quote a Kuwati source, weren't they the ones that gave us the "Iraqi soldiers were throwing babies on the floor to steal the incubators" story?

No more troops if it works? hahhaha, well, if it doesnt work, then you would be calling for the same thing. So you are trying to corner us.
BUTTTTTTTTTTTT, why would sucess mean not doing more of the same that is succesful. Hey, yea, brilliant. I invested money in real estate, it didnt do so well, so I doulbed my investment and it took off. I guess to you that means to not increase my investment any more

 

[red states rule]

The Poll You’ll Never Hear about: Only 27% of Iraqis Believe it’s a Civil War
Posted by Noel Sheppard on March 19, 2007 - 00:34.
There were two Iraq polls released on Sunday. One is guaranteed to be headline news. The other will likely be totally ignored.

In fact, one of the polls was already referenced by George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week,” as well as reported by USA Today and CNN.

Know what the difference is between these surveys, both of which rather compelling as they asked questions of Iraqi citizens? Well, one painted a rather dire picture of conditions in the embattled country, while the other found a very optimistic people who don’t believe their nation is in a civil war.

As the American media will likely focus all of its attention on the more pessimistic survey, here is the contrary view nobody other than Fox News is likely to cover as reported by the Sunday Times (emphasis added throughout):

DESPITE sectarian slaughter, ethnic cleansing and suicide bombs, an opinion poll conducted on the eve of the fourth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq has found a striking resilience and optimism among the inhabitants.

The poll, the biggest since coalition troops entered Iraq on March 20, 2003, shows that by a majority of two to one, Iraqis prefer the current leadership to Saddam Hussein’s regime, regardless of the security crisis and a lack of public services.

The survey, published today, also reveals that contrary to the views of many western analysts, most Iraqis do not believe they are embroiled in a civil war.

Is it becoming clear why you are unlikely to hear anything about this poll? Yet, that was only the beginning of the startling findings:

The 400 interviewers who fanned out across Iraq last month found that the sense of security felt by Baghdad residents had significantly improved since polling carried out before the US announced in January that it was sending in a “surge” of more than 20,000 extra troops.

[…]

49% of those questioned preferred life under Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, to living under Saddam. Only 26% said things had been better in Saddam’s era, while 16% said the two leaders were as bad as each other and the rest did not know or refused to answer.

And, there was even more good news:

The poll suggests a significant increase in support for Maliki. A survey conducted by ORB in September last year found that only 29% of Iraqis had a favourable opinion of the prime minister.

Another surprise was that only 27% believed they were caught up in a civil war. Again, that number divided along religious lines, with 41% of Sunnis believing Iraq was in a civil war, compared with only 15% of Shi’ites.

[…]

One question showed the sharp divide in attitudes towards the continued presence of foreign troops in Iraq. Some 53% of Iraqis nationwide agree that the security situation will improve in the weeks after a withdrawal by international forces, while only 26% think it will get worse.

“We’ve been polling in Iraq since 2005 and the finding that most surprised us was how many Iraqis expressed support for the present government,” said Johnny Heald, managing director of ORB. “Given the level of violence in Iraq, it shows an unexpected level of optimism.”

Despite the sectarian divide, 64% of Iraqis still want to see a united Iraq under a central national government.

Rather unfortunate that Americans will likely hear very little about this survey, wouldn’t you agree?

What a disgrace.

http://newsbusters.org/node/11497

 

[red states rule]

Are you telling me the Iraqis are gonna hand over their country to Al Qaida?? If so why THE HELL ARE WE DEFENDING THEM??

So according to Redstatesrules the SUNNIS AND SHIITES are allied with Al Qaida. How else do you explain the handing of Iraq over to terrorists??

March 18, 2007
Are we winning in Iraq?
Greg Richards
Nibras Kazimi thinks so. In a piece posted this week called "Jihadist Meltdown" he all but declares victory:

There is always a moment during a raging battle when one side realizes that the field has been won, and the other side collapses in retreat and confusion. The curious thing about the Iraqi insurgency is that this moment has arrived, yet both the victors, in this case the Americans and the Iraqi government, and the losers, Al Qaeda and the other jihadist groups, are reluctant to acknowledge it.

But make no mistake, the battle has been turned and we are witnessing the beginning of a jihadist meltdown.
He develops this argument in some detail in the post.


Let's review the course of events in Iraq over the last nine months very briefly:

Jun 8, 2006: Zarkawi killed. It appears he may have been given up by the Sunnis as part of a settlement.


Jul - Aug, 2006 Violence explodes in Baghdad - operation Together Forward formed to combat it. If there was a settlement, it collapsed.


Sep - Oct, 2006 Operation Together Forward fails - U.S. casualties spike in October.


Nov 7, 2006 Democrats take control of Congress


Nov 8, 2006 Donald Rumsfeld resigns


Nov - present Iraqi dinar and the Iraq Stock Exchange Index begin sustained advances from early November lows


Jan 10, 2007 Bush announces surge strategy


Jan 15, 2007 General Petraeus is appointed commander in Iraq


Mar 8, 2007 General Petraeus' first press conference in Iraq after being there for a month - cautiously optimistic
So far as we can tell, it appears that the opposition undertook its Tet Offensive in the months following Zarkawi's death in an effort to crack American will in the lead-up to the election. Recall that Tet occurred in the election year of 1968, albeit much earlier in that year. Kazimi has a detailed analysis of the players in the opposition and the forces working on them. His piece is well worth reading in its entirety.


Is it a coincidence that the Iraqi dinar began its advance just at the time that the United States reorganized its war effort? I suspect not. President Bush very likely overdelegated all aspects of the war - planning, strategy and execution - to people who turned out, quite surprisingly, not to be up to their tasks. It is not to his credit that it took so long for him to see this. But, then great affairs of state tend not to go smoothly. How was it possible, for instance, for the powers-that-be to permit the Pacific Fleet to be sunk at anchor when the entire purpose of its being in Pearl Harbor was to protect the country during a period when war raged in both Europe and Asia? And yet it happened. And we recovered.


President Bush is very resilient. If he was slow in seeing the problem, he remained undismayed and he reenergized our strategy with new plans and particularly new leadership. In General Petraeus he seems to have found someone who believes in the mission and is willing to undertake the effort to succeed at it, something that had - surprisingly - been lacking in our effort up to this time. It appears that up to now, those in whom Bush had placed confidence saw it as their job to educate him on the virtues of defeat. He has rejected that education.


The Iraq Stock Exchange Index (ISX) continues to advance, and now, at 27.049 is as high as it has been since early November (27.040), mirroring the advance of the Iraqi dinar. Why is this significant? The Iraq Stock Exchange is small and illiquid. It appears to trade about twice per week. But it is an open market and gives people an opportunity to vote with their pocketbooks. The ISX is well below its levels of a year ago, but the trend in recent months, following the worst violence of the war in Baghdad, is up. What does that tell you?


It is said that Iraq is the only country in the Middle East with all three great resources - water, oil and arable land. And a vigorous population. Quite a combination if the bad guys can be defeated. And the locals are betting on that outcome, as can be seen in the dinar and the ISX.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2007/03/are_we_winning_in_iraq.html

 

[glockmail]

Nobody said he was a good/nice dictator. But we had one thing in common with him.....HATRED FOR RADICAL ISLAMIC MILITANTS (he was secular after all). He was also an enemy of Iran and OSAMA. .....

Incorrect. Saddam was supporting bin Laden.

 

[red states rule]

The Al Qaeda Connection

by Stephen F. Hayes



OOPS. In what could go down as the Mother of All Copyediting Errors, Babil, the official newspaper of Saddam Hussein's government, run by his oldest son Uday, last fall published information that appears to confirm U.S. allegations of links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. It adds one more piece to the small pile of evidence emerging from Iraq that, when added to the jigsaw puzzle we already had, makes obsolete the question of whether Saddam and Osama bin Laden were in league and leaves in doubt only the extent of the connection.

In its November 16, 2002, edition, Babil identified one Abd-al-Karim Muhammad Aswad as an "intelligence officer," describing him as the "official in charge of regime's contacts with Osama bin Laden's group and currently the regime's representative in Pakistan." A man of this name was indeed the Iraqi ambassador to Pakistan from the fall of 1999 until the fall of the regime.

Aswad's name was included in something Babil called an "honor list." Below that heading, in boldface type, came a straightforward introductory comment: "We publish this list of great men for the sons of our great people to see." Directly beneath that declaration came a cryptic addendum--included by accident?--in regular type: "This is a list of the henchmen of the regime. Our hands will reach them sooner or later. Woe unto them. A list of the leaders of Saddam's regime, as well as their present and previous posts."

Then comes the list of regime officials. It is in alphabetical order
until, halfway down the page, it starts over with officials whose names begin with the letter "A." It includes Baath party leaders, military heroes, ambassadors, intelligence chiefs, the commander of the "Saddam Cubs Training Center," governors of Iraqi provinces, chemical and biological weapons experts, and so on.

U.S. intelligence experts have not conclusively determined what the list means. One possible explanation they have entertained is that part of the list came from an opposition source, and that Babil republished it as a gesture of defiance. This would account for the reference to "henchmen of the regime" whom "our hands will reach"--to say nothing of the candid description of Aswad's duties.

Sounds plausible. But that explanation leaves unanswered one important question: Why would the regime, at a time when it was publicly denying any link to al Qaeda, publish anything admitting such a link?

Even if the identification of Aswad in the Babil list was nothing more than an embarrassing editorial oversight, several recent developments have bolstered the Bush administration's case that Saddam Hussein had connections to the al Qaeda leader.

On April 28, senior administration officials announced that the United States had captured an al Qaeda terrorist operating in Baghdad. The operative is believed to have been an associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a top al Qaeda figure who plotted the assassination of Laurence Foley, an American diplomat gunned down in Jordan last fall. Zarqawi is also believed to have received medical treatment in Baghdad after he was wounded fighting U.S. troops in Afghanistan.

That arrest came shortly after U.S. troops patrolling the Syrian border captured Farouk Hijazi, long believed to have been an outreach coordinator of sorts between the Iraqi government and al Qaeda. Hijazi, formerly a high-ranking Iraqi intelligence official, has confirmed to U.S. officials that he met Osama bin Laden in Sudan in 1994. He denies meeting with al Qaeda officials in 1998, but U.S. officials don't believe him. At that time, a leading newspaper in Rome reported that Hijazi traveled to Afghanistan on December 21, 1998, to offer asylum to bin Laden. The Corriere della Sera described Hijazi as "the person who has been responsible for nurturing Iraq's ties with the fundamentalist warriors since 1994."
Back then, reports about a budding Hussein-bin Laden partnership were not limited to the foreign press. Newsweek magazine, in its January 11, 1999, issue, ran the headline "Saddam + Bin Laden." The subhead declared, "America's two enemies are courting." The article was written by Christopher Dickey, Gregory Vistica, Russell Watson, and Joseph Contreras. The authors cited reports from an "Arab intelligence source" about the alliance.

According to this source, Saddam expected last month's American and British bombing campaign to go on much longer than it did. The dictator believed that as the attacks continued, indignation would grow in the Muslim world, making his terrorism offensive both harder to trace and more effective. With acts of terror contributing to chaos in the region, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait might feel less inclined to support Washington. Saddam's long-term strategy,
according to several sources, is to bully or cajole Muslim countries into breaking the embargo against Iraq, without waiting for the United Nations to lift it formally.

(Interestingly, after Colin Powell's presentation last month to the U.N. Security Council linking Hussein and al Qaeda, Dickey reversed course and referred to the evidence of these links as "egregious smokescreens.")

The timing here is critical. Operation "Desert Fox" began on December 16, 1998, and ended after just 70 hours, on December 19, 1998. Two days later, Hijazi was dispatched to meet with al Qaeda leaders. And the Newsweek report detailing the increased collaboration appeared shortly thereafter. And it wasn't just Newsweek.

In fact, Time magazine, in an issue also out January 11, 1999, one-upped its competitor by quoting bin Laden himself on the Iraq issue. "There is no doubt that the treacherous attack has confirmed that Britain and America are acting on behalf of Israel and the Jews, paving the way for the Jews to divide the Muslim world once again, enslave it and loot the rest of its wealth. A great part of the force that carried out the attack came from certain Gulf countries that have lost their sovereignty."

U.S. intelligence officials who have expressed skepticism about a Hussein-bin Laden relationship often point to religious differences as the reason for their doubts. Hussein was secular, they say, bin Laden a fundamentalist. True enough. But, as bin Laden's comments suggest, there were bigger concerns--that America and "the Jews" might "divide the Muslim world once again"--that would trump these differences and unite the two men against a common enemy.

The Hijazi meeting wasn't the only Iraq-al Qaeda around that time. Eleven months before bin Laden spoke to Time, then-President Bill Clinton traveled to the Pentagon, where he gave a speech preparing the nation for war with Iraq. Clinton told the world that Saddam Hussein would work with an "unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals." His warning was stern.

We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. . . . They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein.

The timing, once again, is critical. Clinton's speech came on February 18, 1998. The next day, according to documents uncovered earlier this week in Baghdad, Saddam Hussein reached out to bin Laden. A document dated February 19, 1998, and labeled "Top Secret and Urgent" tells of a plan for an al Qaeda operative to travel from Sudan to Iraq for talks with Iraqi intelligence. The memo focused on Saudi Arabia, another common bin Laden and Hussein foe, and declared that the Mukhabarat would pick up "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document further explained that the message "would relate to the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The document also held open the possibility that the al Qaeda representative could be "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

There is certainly much more to learn about the "contacts with bin Laden" after this meeting. What is clear, though, is that it is no longer defensible to claim there were no contacts. The skeptics, including many at the CIA, who argued that previous evidence of such links was not compelling, ought to be convinced now. They may well argue that, given the timing of the contacts, Saddam reached out to al Qaeda only when he felt threatened. The facts as we know them today are consistent with such a conclusion. But as journalists continue to pore over documents, and military analysts begin to do the same, it would be hasty to imagine that we've already uncovered everything there is to find on the bin Laden-Saddam tie.

Whatever the differences between al Qaeda and the Iraqi regime, the two shared a hatred of America. One Iraqi official, some weeks after the September 11 attacks, publicly criticized the United States for rooting out al Qaeda in Afghanistan. The official was quoted in a report in broken English carried on The Pakistan Newswire of October 29, 2001, which said: "He stressed the US to stop bombardment on Afghanistan resulting in death of innocent children, women and elderly people." The official, who had been in his job since 1999, also expressed doubt that bin Laden was even a terrorist and responsible for 9/11. He "said the US President Bush should knock the door of international court of justice to address the situation because only court had authority to declare Prime suspect of September 11 tragedy 'Osama Bin Laden' terrorist or not.'"

You might recognize the official's name. It was published in Babil last fall: Abd-al-Karim Muhammad Aswad, "intelligence officer, official in charge of regime's contacts with Osama bin Laden's group and currently the regime's representative in Pakistan."


Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/002/628wqxma.asp?pg=2

 

[glockmail]

The Al Qaeda Connection

by Stephen F. Hayes



OOPS. In what could go down as the Mother of All Copyediting Errors, Babil, the official newspaper of Saddam Hussein's government, run by his oldest son Uday, last fall published information that appears to confirm U.S. allegations of links between the Iraqi regime and al Qaeda. It adds one more piece to the small pile of evidence emerging from Iraq that, when added to the jigsaw puzzle we already had, makes obsolete the question of whether Saddam and Osama bin Laden were in league and leaves in doubt only the extent of the connection. ....

 

[red states rule]

Saddam's al Qaeda Connection
From the September 1 / September 8, 2003 issue: The evidence mounts, but the administration says surprisingly little.
by Stephen F. Hayes



In interviews conducted over the past six weeks with uniformed officers on the ground in Iraq, intelligence officials, and senior security strategists, several things became clear. Contrary to the claims of its critics, the Bush administration has consistently underplayed the connections between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Evidence of these links existed before the war. In making its public case against the Iraq regime, the Bush administration used only a fraction of the intelligence it had accumulated documenting such collaboration. The intelligence has, in most cases, gotten stronger since the end of the war. And through interrogations of high-ranking Iraqi officials, documents from the regime, and further interrogation of al Qaeda detainees, a clearer picture of the links between Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein is emerging.



WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION ALLEGED
TOP U.S. OFFICIALS linked Iraq and al Qaeda in newspaper op-eds, on talk shows, and in speeches. But the most detailed of their allegations came in an October 7, 2002, letter from CIA director George Tenet to Senate Intelligence chairman Bob Graham and in Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations Security Council.

The Tenet letter declassified CIA reporting on weapons of mass destruction and Iraq's links to al Qaeda. Two sentences on WMD garnered most media attention, but the intelligence chief's comments on al Qaeda deserved notice. "We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al Qa'ida going back a decade," Tenet wrote. "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal non-aggression. Since Operation Enduring Freedom [in Afghanistan], we have solid evidence of the presence in Iraq of al Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad. We have credible reporting that al Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs." In sum, the letter said, "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with
growing indications of a relationship with al Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military actions."

That this assessment came from the CIA--with its history of institutional skepticism about the links--was significant. CIA analysts had long contended that Saddam Hussein's secular regime would not collaborate with Islamic fundamentalists like bin Laden--even though the Baathists had exploited Islam for years, whenever it suited their purposes. Critics of the administration insist the CIA was "pressured" by an extensive and aggressive intelligence operation set up by the Pentagon to find ties where none existed. But the Pentagon team consisted of two people, at times assisted by two others. Their assignment was not to collect new intelligence but to evaluate existing intelligence gathered by the CIA, with particular attention to any possible Iraq-al Qaeda collaboration. A CIA counterterrorism team was given a similar task, and while many agency analysts remained skeptical about links, the counterterrorism experts came away convinced that there had been cooperation.

For one thing, they cross-referenced old intelligence with new information provided by high-level al Qaeda detainees. Reports of collaboration grew in number and specificity. The case grew stronger. Throughout the summer and fall of 2002, al Qaeda operatives held in Guantanamo corroborated previously sketchy reports of a series of meetings in Khartoum, Sudan, home to al Qaeda during the mid-90s. U.S. officials learned more about the activities of Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi, an al Qaeda WMD specialist sent by bin Laden to seek WMD training, and possibly weapons, from the Iraqi regime. Intelligence specialists also heard increasingly detailed reports about meetings in Baghdad between al Qaeda leaders and Uday Hussein in April 1998, at a birthday celebration for Saddam.

In December 2002, as the Bush administration prepared its public case for war with Iraq, White House officials sifted through reams of these intelligence reports on ties between Saddam Hussein's regime and al Qaeda. Some of the reporting was solid, some circumstantial. The White House identified those elements of the reports it wanted to use publicly and asked the CIA to declassify them. The Agency agreed to declassify some 75 percent of the requested intelligence.

According to administration sources, Colin Powell, in his presentation before the U.N. Security Council, used only 10 or 15 percent of the newly declassified material. He relied heavily on the intelligence in Tenet's letter. Press reports about preparations for the Powell presentation have suggested that Powell refused to use the abundance of CIA documents because he found them thin and unpersuasive. This is only half right. Powell was certainly the most skeptical senior administration official about Iraq-al Qaeda ties. But several administration officials involved in preparing his U.N. presentation say that his reluctance to focus on those links had more to do with the forum for his speech--the Security Council--than with concerns about the reliability of the information.

Powell's presentation sought to do two things: make a compelling case to the world, and to the American public, about the threat posed by Saddam Hussein; and more immediately, win approval for a second U.N. resolution explicitly authorizing the use of force. The second of these objectives, these officials say, required Powell to focus the presentation on Hussein's repeated violations of Security Council resolutions. (Even in the brief portion of Powell's talk focused on Iraq-al Qaeda links, he internationalized the case, pointing out that the bin Laden network had targeted "France, Britain, Spain, Italy, Germany, and Russia.") Others in the administration, including Vice President Dick Cheney, favored using more of the declassified information about Hussein's support of international terrorism and al Qaeda.

Powell spent just 10 minutes of a 90-minute presentation on the "sinister nexus between Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist network." He mentioned intelligence showing that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a known al Qaeda associate injured in Afghanistan, had traveled to Baghdad for medical treatment. Powell linked Zarqawi to Ansar al-Islam, an al Qaeda cell operating in a Kurdish region "outside Saddam Hussein's controlled Iraq." Powell told the Security Council that the United States had approached an unnamed "friendly security service"--Jordan's--"to approach Baghdad about extraditing Zarqawi," providing information and details "that should have made it easy to find Zarqawi." Iraq did nothing. Finally, Powell asserted that al Qaeda leaders and senior Iraqi officials had "met at least eight times" since the early 1990s.

These claims, the critics maintain, were "hyped" and "exaggerated."



WHAT THE ADMINISTRATION DIDN'T USE
IF THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION had been out to hype the threat from an al Qaeda-Saddam link, it stands to reason that it would have used every shred of incriminating evidence at its disposal. Instead, the administration was restrained in its use of available intelligence. What the Bush administration left out is in some ways as revealing as what it included.

* Iraqi defectors had been saying for years that Saddam's regime trained "non-Iraqi Arab terrorists" at a camp in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. U.N. inspectors had confirmed the camp's existence, including the presence of a Boeing 707. Defectors say the plane was used to train hijackers; the Iraqi regime said it was used in counterterrorism training. Sabah Khodada, a captain in the Iraqi Army, worked at Salman Pak. In October 2001, he told PBS's "Frontline" about what went on there. "Training is majorly on terrorism. They would be trained on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism. . . . All this training is directly toward attacking American targets, and American interests."

But the Bush administration said little about Salman Pak as it demonstrated links between Iraq and al Qaeda. According to administration sources, some detainees who provided credible evidence of other links between Iraq and al Qaeda, including training in terrorism and WMD, insist they have no knowledge of Salman Pak. Khodada, the Iraqi army captain, also professed ignorance of whether the trainees were members of al Qaeda. "Nobody came and told us, 'This is al Qaeda people,'" he explained, "but I know there were some Saudis, there were some Afghanis. There were some other people from other countries getting trained."

* On February 13, 2003, the government of the Philippines asked Hisham al Hussein, the second secretary of the Iraqi embassy in Manila, to leave the country. According to telephone records obtained by Philippine intelligence, Hussein had been in frequent contact with two leaders of Abu Sayyaf, an al Qaeda affiliate in South Asia, immediately before and immediately after they detonated a bomb in Zamboanga City. That attack killed two Filipinos and an American Special Forces soldier and injured several others. Hussein left the Philippines for Iraq after he was "PNG'd"--declared persona non grata--by the Philippine government and has not been heard from since.

According to a report in the Christian Science Monitor, an Abu Sayyaf leader who planned the attack bragged on television a month after the bombing that Iraq had contacted him about conducting joint operations. Philippine intelligence officials were initially skeptical of his boasting, but after finding the telephone records they believed him.

* No fewer than five high-ranking Czech officials have publicly confirmed that Mohammed Atta, the lead September 11 hijacker, met with Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, an Iraqi intelligence officer working at the Iraqi embassy, in Prague five months before the hijacking. Media leaks here and in the Czech Republic have called into question whether Atta was in Prague on the key dates--between April 4 and April 11, 2001. And several high-ranking administration officials are "agnostic" as to whether the meeting took place. Still, the public position of the Czech government to this day is that it did.

That assertion should be seen in the context of Atta's curious stop-off in Prague the previous spring, as he traveled to the United States. Atta flew to Prague from Germany on May 30, 2000, but did not have a valid visa and was denied entry. He returned to Germany, obtained the proper paperwork, and took a bus back to Prague. One day later, he left for the United States.

Despite the Czech government's confirmation of the Atta-al Ani meeting, the Bush administration dropped it as evidence of an al Qaeda-Iraq connection in September 2002. Far from hyping this episode, administration officials refrained from citing it as the debate over the Iraq war heated up in Congress, in the country, and at the U.N.



WHAT THE GOVERNMENT HAS LEARNED SINCE THE WAR
THE ADMINISTRATION'S CRITICS, including several of the Democratic presidential candidates, have alluded to new "evidence" they say confirms Iraq and al Qaeda had no relationship before the war. They have not shared that evidence.

Even as the critics withhold the basis for their allegations, evidence on the other side is piling up. Ansar al-Islam--the al Qaeda cell formed in June 2001 that operated out of northern Iraq before the war, notably attacking Kurdish enemies of Saddam--has stepped up its activities elsewhere in the country. In some cases, say national security officials, Ansar is joining with remnants of Saddam's regime to attack Americans and nongovernmental organizations working in Iraq. There is some reporting, unconfirmed at this point, that the recent bombing of the U.N. headquarters was the result of a joint operation between Baathists and Ansar al-Islam.

And there are reports of more direct links between the Iraqi regime and bin Laden. Farouk Hijazi, former Iraqi ambassador to Turkey and Saddam's longtime outreach agent to Islamic fundamentalists, has been captured. In his initial interrogations, Hijazi admitted meeting with senior al Qaeda leaders at Saddam's behest in 1994. According to administration officials familiar with his questioning, he has subsequently admitted additional contacts, including a meeting in late 1997. Hijazi continues to deny that he met with bin Laden on December 21, 1998, to offer the al Qaeda leader safe haven in Iraq. U.S. officials don't believe his denial.

For one thing, the meeting was reported in the press at the time. It also fits a pattern of contacts surrounding Operation Desert Fox, the series of missile strikes the Clinton administration launched at Iraq beginning December 16, 1998. The bombing ended 70 hours later, on December 19, 1998. Administration officials now believe Hijazi left for Afghanistan as the bombing ended and met with bin Laden two days later.

Earlier that year, at another point of increased tension between the United States and Iraq, Hussein sought to step up contacts with al Qaeda. On February 18, 1998, after the Iraqis repeatedly refused to permit U.N. weapons inspectors into sensitive sites, President Bill Clinton went to the Pentagon and delivered a hawkish speech about Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and his links to "an unholy axis of terrorists, drug traffickers, and organized international criminals." Said Clinton: "We have to defend our future from these predators of the 21st century. . . . They will be all the more lethal if we allow them to build arsenals of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons and the missiles to deliver them. We simply cannot allow that to happen. There is no more clear example of this threat than Saddam Hussein."

The following day, February 19, 1998, according to documents unearthed in Baghdad after the recent war by journalists Mitch Potter and Inigo Gilmore, Hussein's intelligence service wrote a memo detailing upcoming meetings with a bin Laden representative traveling to Baghdad. Each reference to bin Laden had been covered with Liquid Paper. The memo laid out a plan to step up contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. The Mukhabarat, one of Saddam's security forces, agreed to pay for "all the travel and hotel costs inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and to convey to his envoy an oral message from us to bin Laden." The document set as the goal for the meeting a discussion of "the future of our relationship with him, bin Laden, and to achieve a direct meeting with him." The al Qaeda representative, the document went on to suggest, might be "a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden."

I emailed Potter, a Jerusalem-based correspondent for the Toronto Star, about his findings last month. He was circumspect about the meaning of the document. "So did we find the tip of the iceberg, or the whole iceberg? Did bin Laden and Saddam agree to disagree and that was the end of it? I still don't know." Still, he wrote, "I have no doubt that what we found is the real thing. We plucked it out of a building that had been J-DAMed and was three-quarters gone. Beyond the pale to think that the CIA or someone else planted false evidence in such a dangerous location, where only lunatics would bother to tread. And then to cover over the incriminating name Osama bin Laden with Liquid Paper, so that only the most stubborn and dogged of translators would fluke into spotting it?"

Four days after that memo was written, on February 23, 1998, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, issued a famous fatwa about the plight of Iraq. Published that day in al Quds al-Arabi, it reads in part:

First, for over seven years the United States has been occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of places, the Arabian Peninsula, plundering its riches, dictating to its rulers, humiliating its people, terrorizing its neighbors, and turning its bases in the Peninsula into a spearhead through which to fight the neighboring Muslim peoples. . . . The best proof of this is the Americans' continuing aggression against the Iraqi people using the Peninsula as a staging post, even though all its rulers are against their territories being used to that end, still they are helpless. Second, despite the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by the crusader-Zionist alliance, and despite the huge number of those killed, in excess of 1 million . . . despite all this, the Americans are once again trying to repeat the horrific massacres, as though they are not content with the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war or the fragmentation and devastation.

The Americans, bin Laden says, are working on behalf of Israel.

The best proof of this is their eagerness to destroy Iraq, the strongest neighboring Arab state, and their endeavor to fragment all the states of the region such as Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Sudan into paper statelets and through their disunion and weakness to guarantee Israel's survival and the continuation of the brutal crusade occupation of the Peninsula.

Bin Laden urges his followers to act. "The ruling to kill all Americans and their allies--civilians and military--is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it." It was around this time, U.S. officials say, that Hussein paid the $300,000 to bin Laden's deputy, Zawahiri.


ACCORDING TO U.S. officials, soldiers in Iraq have discovered additional documentary evidence like the memo Potter found. This despite the fact that there is no team on the ground assigned to track down these contacts--no equivalent to the Iraq Survey Group looking for evidence of Saddam's weapons of mass destruction. Interviews with detained senior Iraqi intelligence officials are rounding out the picture.

The Bush administration has thus far chosen to keep the results of its postwar findings to itself; much of the information presented here comes from public sources. The administration, spooked by the media feeding frenzy surrounding yellowcake from Niger, is exercising extreme caution in rolling out the growing evidence of collaboration between al Qaeda and Baathist Iraq. As the critics continue their assault on a prewar "pattern of deception," the administration remains silent.



Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.

 

[glockmail]

Saddam's al Qaeda Connection
From the September 1 / September 8, 2003 issue: The evidence mounts, but the administration says surprisingly little.
by Stephen F. Hayes ......

The Bush administration has thus far chosen to keep the results of its postwar findings to itself; much of the information presented here comes from public sources. The administration, spooked by the media feeding frenzy surrounding yellowcake from Niger, is exercising extreme caution in rolling out the growing evidence of collaboration between al Qaeda and Baathist Iraq. As the critics continue their assault on a prewar "pattern of deception," the administration remains silent.
.......

Looks like ol' Karl Rove is preparing his war chest for 2008!

 

[red states rule]

Looks like ol' Karl Rove is preparing his war chest for 2008!

The Defeatocrats are doing what they do best - fuck over America and the US military

 

[glockmail]

The Defeatocrats are doing what they do best - fuck over America and the US military

Its going to come back to haunt them when things in Iraq start to really shine, bin Laden is paraded through Gitmo, and the huge pile of evidence about the whole democrats-binladed saddam connection is laid out in perfect detail.

 

[red states rule]

Its going to come back to haunt them when things in Iraq start to really shine, bin Laden is paraded through Gitmo, and the huge pile of evidence about the whole democrats-binladed saddam connection is laid out in perfect detail.

If that happens the ACLU will file papers to have him released because his Miranda rights were not read to him, the war was illegal, and the US has no cause to arrest him

Sen Kennedy, Kerry, and Clinton will lead a delagation to make sure he is givin a copy of the Koran, he is given a prayer mat, and his TV does not have Fox News as a channel selection (that is torture you know to libs)