PHOTO: AFP
Posted on 05/16/2003 5:34:30 AM PDT by Enemy Of The State
Bush feeling heat after Saudi attacksDISTRACTED?: The White House has rejected charges that it has been focusing too much on Iraq and hasn't really paid attention to the real threat posed by al-Qaeda
THE GUARDIAN
Friday, May 16, 2003,Page 6
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| An woman cries as she passes by debris of a destroyed building in a residential compound in the Saudi capital of Riyadh. PHOTO: AFP |
With President George W. Bush's critics alleging that serious counter-terrorism efforts had become "lost in the shuffle," analysts warned that by fostering the widespread perception that Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda were closely linked, the White House may have created unrealistic expectations that in destroying the Iraqi regime, it was also crushing the terrorist threat.
But the president's press spokesman, Ari Fleischer, dismissed as "nonsense" claims by two Democratic senators that the Bush administration was neglecting the hunt for the terrorists behind the Sept. 11 atrocities.
Fleischer said that the suspected mastermind of those attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, headed a long list of people linked to al-Qaeda who had been taken into custody in recent months.
Fleischer was responding to a coruscating attack from Senator Bob Graham, who had argued earlier that the Saudi bombings "could have been avoided if you had actually crushed the basic infrastructure of al-Qaeda."
"I think from the beginning of the war in Afghanistan, which was in early October of 2001, until about February or March 2002, we were making good progress in dismantling the basic structure of al-Qaeda," Graham said. "Then we started to redirect our attention to Iraq, and al-Qaeda has regenerated,"
His remarks were echoed by a Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, who invoked the deaths of Americans in past terror attacks to chastise Bush.
"In many ways, the actual business of combating the terrorist organization or organizations responsible for the attacks on our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, for the attack on the USS Cole, for the horror of September 11, and now, possibly, for [the] attack in Riyadh, seems to be lost in the shuffle," Feingold said.
"The absence of clarity and the absence of data are dangerous. It endangers the American people."
The hot-tempered debate is closely interwoven with the run-up to next year's presidential election: Graham, an outside candidate for the Democratic nomination, is running almost exclusively on his conviction that the administration has been dangerously distracted from the real fight against terrorism.
Bush, meanwhile, has been widely expected to benefit from continued discussion of Iraq and terrorism, since it prevents the Democrats from discussing the economy. As a result, he may even benefit from the Saudi attacks.
Alternatively, though, more attacks on Americans could solidify a perception that Bush is powerless to win his declared "war on terrorism," said Peter Bergen, an expert on al-Qaeda and author of the book Holy War Inc.
"Of course Iraq wasn't going to do much damage to al-Qaeda, because there isn't much evidence they're linked," he said.
"Setting up the expectation that this was going to further the cause is a mistake," he said.
Republicans have consistently sought to present the conflict in Iraq as one part of the larger war on terrorism, even to the extent that the White House has refused to declare an unequivocal end to the recent war.
Al-Qaeda's failure to mount a major terrorist attack during the Iraq war -- as it had threatened -- was proof that "progress has been made," Bergen said.
But "it's a fact of human nature that one tends to think of one thing at once. Clearly, the administration ... was preoccupied with Iraq, and Bin Laden and al-Qaeda fell off the radar screen. Now this comes along and shows they are far from down for the count."
They didn't.
I realize many of our folk and their families make their living there and I empathize.
It reminds me of the old Jack Benny hold-up bit, "your money or your life". The miserly Jack appears to take an eternity to make up his mind.
The American ex-pats in Saudi who were killed had plenty of warning and had to make up their minds.
They just took too long, like Jack.
Leni
Actually many of the 9,170 links say we didn't supply arms. I didn't look at the one you pointed out, maybe you weren't being very critically minded when you picked it out?
Clinton had two opportunities to either capture or kill bin Laden. He declined to act either time. He failed to take significant Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, the embassy bombings in 1998, or the Cole attack in 2000. The cruise missile attacks you mentioned were a pathetic joke that just got Al Qaeda mad at us, instead of fearful of us.
Go talk to someone who cares. Clinton has been demoted to the compost heap of history, and his followers join him there on a regular basis to bury their heads in the stinking morass of the Clinton legacy.
Ah, another smoking gun courtesy of a weekly "arts and entertainment" rag that devotes more staffers to taking orders for escort service classified ads than to writing newspaper articles. Quite the heavy artillery you got there - I'm sure Jayson Blair probably wrote something on this, perhaps you could provide a link to that for a more credible cite than the one you just provided.
Clinton had two opportunities to either capture or kill bin Laden. He declined to act either time. He failed to take significant action after the intial WTC attack, the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, the embassy bombings in 1998, or the Cole attack in 2000. The cruise missile attacks you mentioned were a pathetic joke that just got Al Qaeda mad at us, instead of fearful of us.
Hmm, who's the congressman?
As late as 1989 and 1990, according to a report from U.S. Representative Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio)
Kuchinich? Try again - he's as liberal, partisan and peacenik as they come.
U.S. companies, under permits from the first Bush administration, sent mustard gas materials, live cultures for bacteriological research, to Iraq.
We'd need to have far more information on what these permits entailed - info that is lacking here. They could simply be general export permits.
Mr Rumsfeld recently said that he had, at the December 1983 meeting, “cautioned” Saddam about the use of chemical weapons. That claim does not tally with a declassified State Department note of his meeting. A Pentagon spokesman later said that Mr Rumsfeld issued the caution to Tariq Aziz, the Iraqi Foreign Minister.
Man, if you have to be that anal to make your point, what does that say about the point you are trying to make?
Small point, but quoting from an article about a Congressional report is not the same as quoting from the report itself. One would think that someone who is familiar with the legal definition of "proximate cause" (wait, I take that back) would understand the distinction.
A very sound sentiment, indeed.
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