Saddam and the Terrorists: A marriage

National Review, June 30, 2003 by Mansoor Ijaz

From 1993 to 1998, the Clinton administration politicized intelligence on global terrorism and the rising power of al-Qaeda to such an extent that serious opportunities to dismantle Osama bin Laden's enterprise, and even capture him, were either ignored or purposely botched. I know, because I negotiated more than one opportunity -- including with Sudan -- and witnessed firsthand the games the Clinton White House played with the threats to our national security.

So it is fair game, today, to ask whether the Bush administration did the same -- specifically, by playing fast and loose with evidence of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Did we go to war with inadequate justification? President Bush's political opponents are making the most of the failure -- so far -- to find the WMD. But they are missing the larger picture, which is that Saddam Hussein was tied intimately to global terrorism. Blocked by sanctions, monitored by weapons inspectors (whom he kicked out when they got uncomfortably close to his secrets), and considered a pariah in most of the civilized world, Saddam needed bin Laden's network of suicidal individuals to distribute his recipes and formulas for (and even experimental doses of) weapons of mass terror to use against the U.S. and its allies.

Saddam's game plan almost worked, because most "experts" on terrorism convinced themselves there was an inadequate ideological basis for such an alliance with bin Laden -- and it therefore couldn't exist. But in fact there was no important ideological difference between these terror czars; a common hatred for Israel and the U.S. was enough to seal their cooperation. Bin Laden viewed Saddam as an atheist without morals or scruples, and therefore not a threat to his global jihadist vision; Saddam viewed bin Laden as a useful lunatic whose acolytes could create havoc in the West with some plausibly deniable help from his scientists. All this could be achieved without any threat to Saddam's role as the chief pan-Arab nationalist leader.

Finding Iraq's weapons of mass destruction may be a political imperative in Washington. But bin Laden's unholy alliance with Saddam was the most important reason to destroy Saddam's regime. And evidence uncovered after the Iraq war proves this alliance, and its potential purposes, beyond any reasonable doubt. Consider the following.

One. The Iraqis were intimately involved in helping al-Qaeda develop chemical-weapons capabilities -- and this continues to have consequences. In early June, ten letters laced with toxic powders were found in Belgium addressed to -- among other targets -- Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt and the American, Saudi, and British embassies. All ten were sent by a little-known Islamic extremist group. Lab analyses of sickened postal workers who came into contact with the powder indicate that hydrazine and phenarsazine were present. Phenarsazine chloride is a precursor agent often used in mixing mustard gas or other nerve agents. This comes on the heels of the systematic dismantling of al- Qaeda's Ricin network by U.S. and European intelligence agencies in the months leading up to the Iraq war. That network had been fed recipes, expertise, and money by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a senior al-Qaeda biochemical-weapons expert who received urgent medical treatment in Baghdad last summer and then went into hiding in the Ansar al-Islam terrorist camps in northern Iraq. These camps, in which traces of Ricin were found on the soles of a shoe and boot recovered from the bombed- out wreckage, were populated by over 150 bin Laden-trained disciples. Zarqawi is now believed to be hiding out in Iran, where he may still be able to run parts of the European network that were not dismantled earlier this year.

Two. Documents found in the rubble of Iraq's Mukhabarat intelligence headquarters by reporters for London's Daily Telegraph show that Iraqi military and intelligence officials sought out al-Qaeda leaders much earlier than previously thought, and met with bin Laden on at least two occasions. In addition to previously reported meetings between Farouk Hijazi, a senior Iraqi intelligence officer, and bin Laden in Sudan in 1994, the Mukhabarat documents show that on February 19, 1998, about six months prior to the attacks in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, Iraqi intelligence officials made plans to bring a senior bin Laden aide to Baghdad from Khartoum. The key document shows that a recommendation was made for "the deputy director general [of Iraqi intelligence to] bring the [bin Laden] envoy to Iraq because we may find in this envoy a way to maintain contacts with bin Laden." The meetings took place in March 1998.

Concurrent with Saddam's outreach program to al-Qaeda was Sudan's almost desperate efforts to convince the Clinton administration to examine the intelligence they had gathered on everyone from bin Laden and his key deputy, Egyptian Islamic Jihad chief Ayman al-Zawahiri, to members of the Hamburg cell who provided aid to many of the 9/11 hijackers. Correspondence of February 1998 from Sudan's intelligence chief to the FBI's regional director went without reply until June 24, 1998, at which time the FBI sheepishly made it clear that the problem in communicating with Sudan lay elsewhere in the U.S. bureaucracy. The U.S. embassies were bombed six weeks later.