The Paris Bureau of NEWSWEEK is moving, and we’ve been cleaning out our files. I’m surrounded by boxes of books, discarded papers, carbon copies of ancient memos. A lot of them are about terrorism and the Middle East, and some of the headlines from before I was born are depressingly eternal. (“Palestine Alert: Peace Through Force?” read the cover of the magazine in February 1947.) But most disturbing are those scraps of paper that are just a little different from what I thought I remembered, the ones that make me think back through what really happened.
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We all have a tendency to recall events selectively, and fit them into patterns that work for us emotionally. But selective tales of pain and suffering have a terrible way of feeding fear and hatred. You see this happen all the time in the Middle East, where conflicting Jewish and Arab narratives about historical grief and grievances block peacemakers at every turn. Now in the United States, fired by frustration over the largely thankless war in Iraq and the passions of an election year, opposing narratives of terror and the War on Terror are hardening into stone. The 9/11 Commission has tried to offer a little truth and reconciliation. But for true believers, Saddam Hussein was either a terrible threat, or no threat; there was every reason to go to war, or no reason at all. And that’s just not the way it was.
A fading computer print-out in a dusty folder marked “to be filed” reminded me of that. It was dated October 2001, not so long ago, and not quite a month after 9/11, addressed from me to an editor in New York. “I think there is ample reason to believe that Saddam is linked to [Osama bin Laden’s] networks,” it began, “and possibly to OBL himself. If these groups ever get a hold of weapons of mass destruction that work, I suspect they will come from him.”
Clearly, I was speculating. But this was an issue I’d been looking at since 1993. I couldn’t prove the connection, but the circumstantial evidence was such that I couldn’t convince myself there was nothing to it, and I mistrusted the pat answers I’d gotten from U.S. officials whenever I tried to investigate the connection. Disconcertingly, some of them gave very different views depending on whether they were on or off the record. On: they said no proven connection. Off: they said in their hearts they believed Saddam might even have been behind the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.
Officials in the Clinton administration, trying to shoot that story down, would act as if they were confiding something and say, off the record of course, that they would like nothing better than to go to war with Iraq, and would love to have the pretext of a terrorist connection. But this was pure bluff. They could never have dreamed, in those days, of pulling together a coalition like the one in the 1991 Gulf War. And “even if they could,” I wrote in that old memo, “the bottom line would be a U.S. military occupation, which no administration wants, or a complete power vacuum, which no one in the region will support.”
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Another common assertion used to discredit speculation about Saddam and radical Islamic groups was the argument that “Saddam’s regime is essentially secular and doesn’t trust the Islamists and they don’t trust him.” Well, sir, “there may not be great reserves of trust, but active and extensive cooperation [with radical Muslim groups] dates back to 1990,” says my half-forgotten note to the editors. Saddam “had longstanding ties to the Muslim Brothers of Syria, with whom he’d intrigued for years to undermine his ideological rival in Damascus. And when the shooting started over Baghdad in 1991, his most vocal support came from the ideologues of Islamic revolution, including [those ruling] Sudan, which never failed to express its solidarity with Saddam’s cause. As a nice little touch, he also put the phrase ‘Allah akbar,’ God is great, on the supposedly secular Iraqi flag.”
“After the war, Saddam continued to gather around him the flotsam and jetsam of the Islamic tide,” the memo continued. “In 1993 I went to a jihad conference in Baghdad attended by Islamic radicals who hailed ‘from Jakarta to Dakar,’ as they liked to say. We’re talking Chechens and Moroccans, Filipinos and Algerians—all sorts. There were so many of them, I couldn’t even get a room at the Rashid Hotel where they were staying.”
That was lucky. “As it happens, an errant American cruise missile hit the Rashid Hotel the [first] night of the conference, blowing up a few people in the lobby.” The Islamic delegates were sure the cruise was meant for them. In fact it was one stray missile in an otherwise accurate U.S. attack on a machine tools factory suspected of producing weapon components. It would be President George H.W. Bush’s parting shot at Saddam’s regime.
Elsewhere in the piles of files littered around my office, I came across an even dustier folder marked “Iraq ’93,” with a few copies of the Baghdad Observer, Saddam’s English language newspaper, from that same week. The description of the “Islamic Popular Conference” makes very interesting reading in light of current events. There were “more than 1,000 religious, political and cultural dignitaries from 51 countries” the paper claimed. It was the second such conference to be held in Baghdad. The previous year, 1992, had drawn representatives from the Islamic National Front in Sudan (which gave asylum to Osama bin Laden at just about this time), and the Islamic National Salvation Front, which was fighting to overthrow the pro-Western military oligarchy in Algeria.
Presiding over the conference was Saddam’s deputy, Izzat Ibrahim, who is the only one of the dictator’s top men still at large in Iraq today. He’s the king of clubs in the famous pack of cards, and allegedly a key figure in the resistance. “Mr. Ibrahim urged Muslims all over the world to conduct holy jihad against the U.S. and its allies,” the Baghdad Observer reported on January 17, 1993. He “urged every Muslim and Arab to implement defined duties”—left undefined in the paper—“against the US-Zionist aggression against Iraq.” Osama bin Laden would later use similar Islamist boilerplate, citing the suffering of the Iraqi people at the hands of the United States, in his public declarations of war against all Jews and all Americans.
It’s also worth remembering that at this point, in early 1993, Saddam had managed to keep his extensive biological weapons production capacity entirely hidden from the United Nations inspections team. They didn’t even begin to get the goods on the germs until late 1994, and they couldn’t prove he had a bio-weapons program until 1995.
So, let’s not say there was no reason to worry about Saddam Hussein and terrorism. There was. And anyone who questions the war would be foolish to assume no weapons of mass destruction will be found, or to insist that no links with Al Qaeda could possibly exist. That’s why you will note many politicians and pundits saying, very carefully, there seem to be no “stockpiles” of weapons. There appear to be no “collaborative” or “operational” links to Al Qaeda.
(In the late 1990s, I asked a very spooky Arab, who brokers intelligence around the Middle East and once had close links to Saddam, if he thought there were contacts between the Iraqi dictator and Osama bin Laden. “Of course,” he said. “Contacts? Absolutely. Look at it this way: you are the head of Saddam’s intelligence service. He calls you in and says, ‘Who have we got in Bin Laden’s organization?’ And you say, ‘Nobody’? I don’t think so. You say that to Saddam, and you’re dead. So you have contacts. But that doesn’t mean you have cooperation.”)
It’s a fact that one artillery shell containing sarin gas turned up as part of an improvised roadside bomb placed by the Iraqi resistance. It seems that those who cobbled it together didn’t know what they had. And one of the key fugitives in the 1993 Trade Center bombing, Abdul Rahman Yasin, fled to Iraq immediately afterward. I reported he was there, living in a comfortable residence, in 1994. Yasin was interviewed in Baghdad by “60 Minutes” in 2002. He remains on the FBI’s most-wanted list of terrorist fugitives. That the Bush administration has made so little of the sarin and of Yasin suggests that neither is quite the “smoking gun” it’s been looking for. But there’s certainly more to discover on both fronts.
So, is this war in Iraq justified or not?
No. It might have been, if the Bush administration hadn’t been in such a rush to go to war in the spring of last year. But my notes on how a potentially righteous cause went so wrong are in a file that’s packed already. I’ll pull it out next week when I get to the new offices.
Follow-up Last week’s Shadowland column noted that the U.S. State Department was about to issue its revised figures for the annual report on “Patterns of Global Terrorism.” Today it did. Instead of 307 deaths in 2003, which the administration claimed erroneously as an indicator its policies are winning the War on Terror, the actual figure is 625, or more than twice as high.
