Every day it seems another
American soldier is killed in Iraq. These grim statistics have become
a favorite of network news anchors and political chat show hosts.
Nevermind that they mix deaths from accidents with actual battlefield
casualties; or that the average is actually closer to one American
death for every two days; or that enemy deaths far outnumber ours.
What matters is the overall impression of mounting, pointless deaths.
That is why is important
to remember why we fight in Iraq -- and who we fight. Indeed, many of
those sniping at U.S. troops are al Qaeda terrorists operating inside
Iraq. And many of bin Laden's men were in Iraq prior to the
liberation. A wealth of evidence on the public record -- from
government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from
major newspapers -- attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and
Saddam going back to 1994.
Those who try to
whitewash Saddam's record don't dispute this evidence; they just
ignore it. So let's review the evidence, all of it on the public
record for months or years:
* Abdul Rahman Yasin
was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993
World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He
fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents
in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin
both a house and monthly salary.
* Bin Laden met at
least eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security
Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and
met with officials from Saddam's mukhabarat, its external
intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United
Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.
* Sudanese intelligence
officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between
Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin
Laden lived in Khartoum.
* Bin Laden met the
director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to
Mr. Powell.
* An al Qaeda operative
now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had
forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist
activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United
Nations.
* In 1999 the
Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a
senior officer in Iraq's mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy
mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with
al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is "thought to have offered bin Laden
asylum in Iraq," the Guardian reported.
* In October 2000,
another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested
near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane's
Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane's
reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and
Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda's No. 2 man.
(Why are all of those
meetings significant? The London Observer reports that FBI
investigators cite a captured al Qaeda field manual in Afghanistan,
which "emphasizes the value of conducting discussions about pending
terrorist attacks face to face, rather than by electronic means.")
* As recently as 2001,
Iraq's embassy in Pakistan was used as a "liaison" between the Iraqi
dictator and al Qaeda, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
* Spanish investigators
have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan -- who is charged
by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the
preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks -- that show the
terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The
invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre," London's
Independent reports.
* An Iraqi defector to
Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told Gwynne
Roberts of the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's
fighters in camps in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a
colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman
Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad. At that vast
compound run by Iraqi intelligence, Muslim militants trained to
hijack planes with knives -- on a full-size Boeing 707. Col.
Mohammed recalls his first visit to Salman Pak this way: "We were
met by Colonel Jamil Kamil, the camp manager, and Major Ali Hawas. I
noticed that a lot of people were queuing for food. (The major) said
to me: 'You'll have nothing to do with these people. They are Osama
bin Laden's group and the PKK and Mojahedin-e Khalq.'"
* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi,
a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the
time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct
connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.
*The Sunday Times
found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been
Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in
Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time
and was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989.
* Following the defeat
of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on
Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Mr. Powell told
the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the
secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and
money for al Qaeda's global network.
* In 2001, an al Qaeda
member "bragged that the situation in Iraq was 'good,'" according to
intelligence made public by Mr. Powell.
* That same year, Saudi
Arabian border guards arrested two al Qaeda members entering the
kingdom from Iraq.
* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi
oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, Mr. Powell told
the United Nations. His specialty was poisons. Wounded in fighting
with U.S. forces, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May
2002. When Zarqawi recovered, he restarted a training camp in
northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October
2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, an official of the U.S. Agency for
International Development, in Amman, Jordan. The captured assassin
confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in
Iraq, Mr. Powell said. His accomplice escaped to Iraq.
*Zarqawi met with
military chief of al Qaeda, Mohammed Ibrahim Makwai (aka Saif
al-Adel) in Iran in February 2003, according to intelligence sources
cited by the Washington Post.
* Mohammad Atef, the
head of al Qaeda's military wing until the U.S. killed him in
Afghanistan in November 2001, told a senior al Qaeda member now in
U.S. custody that the terror network needed labs outside of
Afghanistan to manufacture chemical weapons, Mr. Powell said. "Where
did they go, where did they look?" said the secretary. "They went to
Iraq."
* Abu Abdullah al-Iraqi
was sent to Iraq by bin Laden to purchase poison gases several times
between 1997 and 2000. He called his relationship with Saddam's
regime "successful," Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
* Mohamed Mansour
Shahab, a smuggler hired by Iraq to transport weapons to bin Laden
in Afghanistan, was arrested by anti-Hussein Kurdish forces in May,
2000. He later told his story to American intelligence and a
reporter for the New Yorker magazine.
* Documents found among
the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded
the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an
Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's
Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to
train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy
warrior network" to be established in Baghdad.
* Mullah Melan Krekar,
ran a terror group (the Ansar al-Islam) linked to both bin Laden and
Saddam Hussein. Mr. Krekar admitted to a Kurdish newspaper that he
met bin Laden in Afghanistan and other senior al Qaeda officials.
His acknowledged meetings with bin Laden go back to 1988. When he
organized Ansar al Islam in 2001 to conduct suicide attacks on
Americans, "three bin Laden operatives showed up with a gift of
$300,000 'to undertake jihad,'" Newsday reported. Mr. Krekar
is now in custody in the Netherlands. His group operated in portion
of northern Iraq loyal to Saddam Hussein -- and attacked independent
Kurdish groups hostile to Saddam. A spokesman for the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan told a United Press International correspondent
that Mr. Krekar's group was funded by "Saddam Hussein's regime in
Baghdad."
* After October 2001,
hundreds of al Qaeda fighters are believed to have holed up in the
Ansar al-Islam's strongholds inside northern Iraq.
Some skeptics dismiss the
emerging evidence of a longstanding link between Iraq and al Qaeda by
contending that Saddam ran a secular dictatorship hated by Islamists
like bin Laden.
In fact, there are plenty
of "Stalin-Roosevelt" partnerships between international terrorists
and Muslim dictators. Saddam and bin Laden had common enemies, common
purposes and interlocking needs. They shared a powerful hate for
America and the Saudi royal family. They both saw the Gulf War as a
turning point. Saddam suffered a crushing defeat which he had
repeatedly vowed to avenge. Bin Laden regards the U.S. as guilty of
war crimes against Iraqis and believes that non-Muslims shouldn't have
military bases on the holy sands of Arabia. Al Qaeda's avowed goal for
the past ten years has been the removal of American forces from Saudi
Arabia, where they stood in harm's way solely to contain Saddam.
The most compelling
reason for bin Laden to work with Saddam is money. Al Qaeda operatives
have testified in federal courts that the terror network was always
desperate for cash. Senior employees fought bitterly about the $100
difference in pay between Egyptian and Saudis (the Egyptians made
more). One al Qaeda member, who was connected to the 1998 embassy
bombings, told a U.S. federal court how bitter he was that bin Laden
could not pay for his pregnant wife to see a doctor.
Bin Laden's personal
wealth alone simply is not enough to support a profligate global
organization. Besides, bin Laden's fortune is probably not as large as
some imagine. Informed estimates put bin Laden's pre-Sept. 11, 2001
wealth at perhaps $30 million. $30 million is the budget of a small
school district, not a global terror conglomerate. Meanwhile,
Forbes estimated Saddam's personal fortune at $2 billion.
So a common enemy, a
shared goal and powerful need for cash seem to have forged an alliance
between Saddam and bin Laden. CIA Director George Tenet recently told
the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided
training in document forgery and bomb making to al Qaeda. It also
provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates;
one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as
successful. Mr. Chairman, this information is based on a solid
foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable
sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."
The Iraqis, who had the
Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I,
have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the
Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al Qaeda, this would be a
fearsome weapon in an enclosed space -- like a suburban mall or subway
station.
Mr. Miniter is a senior
fellow at the Center for the New Europe and author of "Losing
bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror"
(Regnery) which is now on the New York Times' bestseller list.
