Cheney is Absolutely Correct

American Thinker ^ | April 09, 2007 | Ray Robison

[neverdem]

On the Rush Limbaugh radio program, VP Cheney restated his position that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda. The Vice President is completely correct. Specifically, he spoke of Abu Mus'ab al Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As much as a year earlier, al Qaeda affiliated jihadists lead by Zarqawi began aggressive attacks on the Kurdish regions in the north of Iraq. Why would this committed jihadist leader bring his fighters to Iraq to attack Saddam's enemies?  

While researching for our new eBook Both In One Trench we realized that there seems to be a confluence of prominent terrorists emanating from Kuwait after it was occupied by Saddam's armies. Many of these men are of Palestinian ethnicity. The Palestinians living in Kuwait had favored Saddam because he was a prominent proponent of the Palestinian cause. Their allegiance to Saddam was so thorough that the Kuwaiti government kicked out its Palestinian population after liberation because they collaborated with Saddam. Saddam's support of Palestinian terrorism is incontrovertible.

A large number of these Palestinians, over a hundred thousand, made their way to Jordan where they began to radicalize the moderate Jordanian population. One of these Palestinians - part of the Palestinian migration from Kuwait which has been  termed the "returnees from Kuwait" - was Sheik Abu-Mohammed al-Maqdisi (or Isam Mohammad Taher al-Barqawi). He would later become a major al Qaeda leader.

Barqawi became the spiritual leader for the newly radicalized Jordanians like Abu Mus'ab Al Zarqawi. Zarqawi would organize a group of radicalized Jordanians and other "returnees from Kuwait" called tawhid, which would align itself with al Qaeda for the Millennium Plot (or before).

Barqawi, a Palestinian-Jordanian, a "returnee from Kuwait" sympathized with Saddam. Barqawi sent Zarqawi to Iraq with other Palestinian-Jordanian "returnees" to fight jihad against Saddam's enemies, not to fight Saddam. It may very well be that Zarqawi had no personal love for the Ba'athists. But Osama bin Laden himself has called for the jihadists in Iraq to work with the Ba'athists to defeat the Christian crusaders.  

A study  reported by the Middle East Media Research Institute explains what happened next:

 The Jihad fighters "related that Abu Mus'ab [Al-Zarqawi] used the experience of the [Iraqi] Ba'th[ists] in his war on the Americans and Iraqis, including regarding the security issue. [A man named] Ahmad clarified that this was particularly true regarding the city of Al-Fallujah, which contained hundreds of former Iraqi military intelligence officers with great experience in the security sphere.

According to one of Zarqawi's own followers, Zarqawi traveled to Iraq where he joined with Saddam's intelligence agents - with great experience - not new recruits but senior level intelligence officials, loyal men who would only have been there if they had been sent by Saddam.

The evidence of this alliance is the insurgency itself. The Iraqi government has many times tried to inform the American public that the leaders of the insurgency are Ba'athists working with al Qaeda. Such reports are ignored or criticized by the US media. Typically, the US media trots out a retired, senior CIA official who made rank under President Clinton to deny these reports because they don't want the American public to know that Ba'athists and Islamic terrorists were working together before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. To acknowledge such a connection would be to demonstrate that certain intelligence officials who said that this type of combined operation could not happen - in fact made careers off the theory after the 1993 WTC attack - were wrong.

Some time after the Saddam regime fell and Zarqawi began to slaughter Iraqis, Barqawi (Maqdisi) got cold feet. He tried to rein-in Zarqawi which caused a split in the Palestinian-Jordanian branch of al Qaeda. In late 2004, Zarqawi distanced himself from the Jordanian branch of al Qaeda by swearing allegiance directly to al Qaeda. In other words, he quit the Barqawi branch of al Qaeda and went to the Ayman al Zawahiri branch because he still needed jihad recruits to fight in Iraq.

Upon breaking away from his mentor, he began to set himself up as the Islamic authority in Iraq (the pupil became the teacher). Those Iraqi intelligence agents who had worked with him since before OIF had themselves become radicalized, realized the Ba'athist regime wasn't coming back, and began to swear loyalty to Zarqawi. Thus, Zarkawi, who had come to Iraq to support the Saddam regime would abandon his directives from his mentor and attempt to take direct control of Iraq.

But why would Saddam send senior IIS agents to work with jihadists? Because they were already working with Islamic jihadists long before the start of OIF. This Dar al Hayat article, "The Resistance In The "Sunni Triangle",  makes clear that because the Iraqi economy was strangled by UN sanctions. Saddam's senior military officials, many of them with land grants in Fallujah - where Zarqawi teamed up with them - had smuggled oil in cooperation with Islamic extremists. These Islamic extremists were joined to Anbar province by religious and tribal affiliation.

These extremists, already living under the radar in places like Jordan, were the perfect smuggling partners. Thus, as the sanctions dragged on, senior Iraqi military leaders and even a few close advisors to Saddam began to adhere to the extremists' Islamic teachings. Initially, Saddam tried to shut it down. But because these Iraqi officials were Saddam's support base, he eventually had to come to terms with them to protect his power. These Islamic extremists and smugglers were from places like the Palestinian "returnee" camps in Jordan. They were feeding Saddam's support base.

Our research points to these Palestinian-Jordanian "returnees" as one of many portals of influence between Saddam and the global Islamic jihad movement. Other portals of influence to the movement include Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (Islamic Party) and Mulla Omar (Taliban) in Afghanistan, Maulana Fazlur Rahman and his jihad political parties in Pakistan, Hassan al Turabi and his National Islamic Front followers in Sudan, and Ayman al Zawahiri himself with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later when it became al Qaeda along with Bin Laden's followers.

To not see the portals means averting the eyes. Too many people who should know better have done so.

Ray Robison is co-author of the forthcoming book Both in One Trench, and a frequent contributor to American Thinker.

Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/2007/04/cheney_is_absolutely_correct.html at April 09, 2007 - 01:51:37 PM EDT

[avacado]

Cheney sure as hell *did* state that Zarqawi was in Baghdad organizing al-Qaeda operations there before we arrived.

Go back and read what I wrote. You are saying exactly what I was saying that Cheney was saying.

[neverdem]

Thanks for posting that article..and the links.

Give credit where credit is due. You can thank Matchett-PI for the bulk of the links.

[cookcounty]

"he spoke of Abu Mus'ab al Zarqawi's presence in Iraq before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. "

......but left out that Zarqawi was treated at Baghdad's Olympic Hospital, a facility reserved for high-ranking Ba'athists and their families. It's like saying if Zarqawi went to the US and got treated at Bethesda Naval Hospital, it doesn't mean that the US government was involved.

[Txsleuth]

Thank you for the links, Matchett!!

I am bookmarking this..it is all important stuff to have on hand.

Great work.

[Matchett-PI]

You’re welcome! :)

[bw17]

Sorry, I was feeling argumentative today and felt like arguing with someone even if they agreed with me.

;-)

[avacado]

LOL!!! Good answer!

[meandog]

Rumsfeld wanted Iraqis in on the action ­ right from the beginning.

LOL...if you go back and do some research you'll learn that he stated in a many newscast that, as the Iraqi officer cadre was comprised of mainly Saddam loyalist revolutionary guards that it had to be a coalition thrust...

The latest post-hoc conventional wisdom on Iraq is that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld won the war but lost the occupation. There are two problems with this analysis (which comes, most forcefully, from The Weekly Standard). First, it’s not Rumsfeld’s occupation; it’s Colin Powell’s and George Tenet’s. Second, although it’s painfully obvious that much is wrong with this occupation, it’s simple-minded to assume that more troops will fix it. More troops may be needed now, but more of the same will not do the job. Something different is needed ­ and was, right from the start.

George Tenent? Colin Powell? ... how about Bremmer, Wolfowitz, Perle and Cheney "they'll welcome us as heroes!" A bigger troop level (surge) IS working in Iraq--you're just not hearing about it!

A Rumsfeld occupation would have been different, and still might be. Rumsfeld wanted to put an Iraqi face on everything at the outset ­ not just on the occupation of Iraq, but on its liberation too. That would have made a world of difference.

Okay, it that argument is true, then who's responsible for not implementing the Rumsfeld plan? Bush? Cheney? (Powell was gone after 2004)

Rumsfeld’s plan was to train and equip ­ and then transport to Iraq ­ some 10,000 Shia and Sunni freedom fighters led by Shia exile leader Ahmed Chalabi and his cohorts in the INC, the multi-ethnic anti-Saddam coalition he created. There, they would have joined with thousands of experienced Kurdish freedom fighters, ably led, politically and militarily, by Jalal Talabani and Massoud Barzani. Working with our special forces, this trio would have sprung into action at the start of the war, striking from the north, helping to drive Baathist thugs from power, and joining Coalition forces in the liberation of Baghdad. That would have put a proud, victorious, multi-ethnic Iraqi face on the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, and it would have given enormous prestige to three stubbornly independent and unashamedly pro-American Iraqi freedom fighters: Chalabi, Talabani, and Barzani.

So I suppose blame for the president for the foul up is justified (as the American electorate did in the last election)?