Don't Start the Second Gulf War

President George W. Bush says that he hasn't made up his mind about "any of our policies in regard to Iraq," but he obviously has. To not attack after spending months talking about the need for regime change is inconceivable. Unfortunately, war is not likely to be the simple and certain procedure that he and many others seem to think.

Lots of arguments have been offered on behalf of striking Baghdad that are not reasons at all. For instance, that Saddam Hussein is an evil man who has brutalized his own people.

Certainly true. But the world is full of brutal regimes that have murdered their own people. Indeed, Washington ally Turkey's treatment of its Kurds is scarcely more gentle than Iraq's Kurdish policies.

Moreover, the U.S. warmly supports the royal kleptocracy next door in Saudi Arabia, fully as totalitarian, if not quite as violent, as Saddam's government. Any non-Muslim and most women would probably prefer living in Iraq.

Also cited is Baghdad's conquest of Kuwait a dozen years ago. It is a bit late to drag that out as a justification for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam. He is far weaker today and has remained firmly contained.

Richard Butler, former head of the U.N. Commission on Iraq, complained to the Senate Foreign Relations that Iraq had violated international law by tossing out arms inspectors. In fact, there are often as many reasons to flout as to obey U.N. rules. Washington shouldn't go to war in some abstract pursuit of "international law."

Slightly more plausible, at least, is the argument that creating a democratic system in Iraq would provide a useful model for the rest of the Mideast. But that presupposes democracy can be easily planted, and that it can survive once the U.S. departs.

Iraq suffers from significant internal stresses. Convenient professions of unity in pursuit of democracy from an opposition once dismissed by Mideast special envoy and retired Gen. Anthony Zinni as "silk-suited, Rolex-wearing guys in London" offer little comfort and are likely to last no longer than have similar promises in Afghanistan.

Also problematic are Kurdish demands for autonomy and Shiite Muslim resistance to the central government. One defense official told the Washington Post: "I think it is almost a certainty that we'd wind up doing a campaign against the Kurds and Shiites." Wouldn't that be pretty? <

There are external threats as well. Particularly worrisome would be covert and possibly overt action by Iran, with which Baghdad fought a decade-long war and which might see intervention against a weakened Iraq as an antidote to serious political unrest at home.

Indeed, the U.S. backed Baghdad in its conflict with Iran and decided not to depose Saddam in 1991, in part out of fear of Iranian aggression throughout the Gulf should Iraq no longer provide a blocking role. Keeping the Iraqi Humpty Dumpty together after a war might not be easy.

Moreover, while Americans might see America's war on Iraq as a war for democracy, most Arabs would likely see it as a war for Washington. If the U.S. deposes Saddam, but leaves in place friendly but despotic regimes elsewhere — such as Egypt, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia — few Arabs would take America's democracy rhetoric seriously. Nor should they. Yet to go to war against everyone, including presumably Iran, Syria, and maybe others, would have incalculable consequences.

Saddam's complicity in September 11 would present a good argument for devastating retaliation for an act of war, but there's no evidence that he was involved. All that exists is a disputed meeting, which might not have occurred, in the Czech Republic between hijacker Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi official.

Certainly Saddam shed no tears over the thousands who died on that tragic day, but he has never been known to promote groups which he does not control. In contrast to Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein is no Muslim fanatic looking forward to his heavenly rewards; moreover, he heads a government and nation against which retaliation is simple.

Probably the best, at least the most fearsome, argument for overthrowing Saddam is the prospect of Baghdad developing weapons of mass destruction. Yet if nonproliferation should be enforced by war, Washington will be very busy in the coming years.

The problem is not just countries like Iran and North Korea, which seem to have or have had serious interest in developing atomic weapons. It is China, which could use them in any conflict with the U.S. over, say, Taiwan. And India, Pakistan, and Russia, which face unpredictable nationalist and theological currents, enjoy governments of varying instability, and offer uncertain security over technical know-how as well as weapons.

Potentially most dangerous is Pakistan's arsenal. The government of Pervez Musharraf is none too steady; Islamabad long supported the Taliban and its military and intelligence forces almost certainly contain al Qaeda sympathizers. It is easy to imagine nuclear technology falling into terrorist hands.

An Iraqi nuclear capability seems less frightening in comparison. Saddam would not use them against America, since to do so would guarantee his incineration. Israel possesses a similarly overbearing deterrent.

Would Baghdad turn atomic weapons over to al Qaeda or similarly motivated terrorists? Not likely.

First, it would be extraordinary for Saddam to give up a technology purchased at such a high price. Second, Baghdad would be the immediate suspect and likely target of retaliation should any terrorist deploy nuclear weapons, and Saddam knows this.

Third, Saddam would be risking his own life. Al Qaeda holds secular Arab dictators in contempt and would not be above attempting to destroy them as well as America.

Of course, the world would be a better place without Saddam's dictatorship. But there are a lot of regimes that should, and eventually will, end up in history's dustbin. That's not a good reason to initiate war against a state which poses no direct, ongoing threat.

Especially since war often creates unpredictable consequences. Without domestic opposition military forces to do America's dirty work, Washington will have to bear most of the burden. The task will be more difficult and expensive without European support and Saudi staging grounds.

If Iraq's forces don't quickly crumble, the U.S. might find itself involved in urban conflict that will be costly in human and political terms. If Baghdad possesses any weapons of mass destruction, Saddam will have an incentive to use them — against America, Israel, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia — since Washington would be dedicated to his overthrow.

Further, the U.S. would be sloshing gasoline over a combustible political situation in friendly but undemocratic Arab regimes stretching from North Africa to Southeast Asia. Israelis and Palestinians are at war, America continues to fight Taliban and al Qaeda forces in Afghanistan as the pro-western government teeters on chaos, fundamentalist Muslims rule western Pakistan, and Muslim extremists are active a dozen other countries. Yet the administration wants to invade Iraq. Riots in Egypt, a fundamentalist rising in Pakistan, a spurt of sectarian violence in Indonesia, and who knows what else could pose a high price for any success in Iraq.

War is a serious business. Making war on a country which does not threaten the U.S. is particularly serious. Even if the optimists who think a campaign against Iraq would be easy are right, and we can only hope they are, war should be a last resort. As House Majority Leader Richard Armey warned, an unprovoked attack "would not be consistent with what we have been as a nation or what we should be as a nation."

There's certainly no hurry to go to war. Nothing is different today from September 10, 2001, or any time since Iraq was ousted from Kuwait. Observes Jim Cornette, formerly an expert in biological warfare with the Air Force: "We've bottled [Saddam] up for 11 years, so we're doing okay."

There are times when Washington has no choice but to fight. Iraq is not such a place and now is not such a time.

— Doug Bandow is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and a former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan.

Jointly published by the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon and the Middle East Forum

Vol. 3 No. 10

Table of Contents
MEIB Main Page

October 2001

Mounting Evidence of Iraqi Link to Terror Attacks
by Ziad K. Abdelnour

Two weeks before the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, Iraqi President Saddam Hussein reportedly put his military on its highest state of alert since the 1991 Gulf War. According to the London-based Sunday Telegraph, the Iraqi leader even took the unusual step of moving his two wives, Sajida and Samira, from Baghdad to an undisclosed location in the family's hometown of Tikrit, 100 miles to the north.¹

Saddam's precautions were hardly unwarranted. A growing body of circumstantial evidence indicates that Iraq may have participated in plotting the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

The most striking evidence linking Baghdad to the perpetrators of the September 11 attacks is that the presumed ringleader of the suspected hijackers, Mohamed Atta, met twice with Iraqi intelligence operatives in the Czech Republic. According to senior Czech officials quoted in the Czech daily Hospodarske Noviny and the Wall Street Journal, Atta traveled from Hamburg, Germany, to Prague in June 2000 and met with Iraqi intelligence agents at Baghdad's embassy there, which has long been under constant surveillance by the Czech authorities. After the meeting, he flew on to the United States, where he began flight lessons the following month. Atta had made a previous attempt to enter the country on May 30, but wasn't allowed to leave the airport upon arriving in Prague because he lacked a visa.²

Atta made a third trip to Prague in April 2001 and met with Ahmad Khalil Ibrahim Samir Al-Ani, the chief of consular affairs at the Iraqi embassy there. Later that month, Ani was expelled by the Czech authorities for "engaging in activities beyond his diplomatic duties" after he was observed photographing the Radio Free Europe building in Prague, which had begun broadcasting anti-Saddam programs into Iraq in 1998. Ani had been under surveillance at the time as a suspected intelligence operative because he "was never present at any diplomatic event," said the Czech Foreign Ministry official who expelled him, Hynek Kmonicek, in an interview with Newsweek. "It's suspicious," said Kmonicek. "Why would a diplomat with no diplomatic duties meet with a student of architecture? How is it possible they even know each other?"³ Czech intelligence officials suspect that Ani may have provided Atta with fake passports for the 19 hijackers that carried out the September 11 attacks.

During his second visit to Prague, Atta also reportedly met with Iraq's ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Hijazi, a former brigadier-general in the General Intelligence Directorate (GID). Hijazi, who was recalled to Baghdad prior to the September 11 attacks, is known to have traveled to Kandahar, Afghanistan to meet with Osama bin Laden in December 1998.⁴ Hijazi is also believed to have met with bin Laden in Sudan prior to the latter's expulsion from the country in 1996.

According to the London-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), Hijazi and Brigadier-General Habib Ma'amouri reportedly developed plans for hijacking civilian airliners and crashing them into civilian targets during the mid-1990s at the GID Special Operations Branch in Salman Pak, south of Baghdad. Two Iraqi defectors have corroborated this claim. A former Iraqi military officer, Sabah Khalifa Khodada Alami, said he was in charge of training an elite special forces team, "designed to plan and conduct operations against US and British interests around the world," at Salman Pak. Using a Boeing 707 parked inside the complex, Alami's team practiced hijacking planes without weapons. He also said that another team of non-Iraqis underwent similar training at the same camp. A second defector gave a similar description of the camp, and recounted meeting some of the non-Iraqi trainees, whom he described as deeply religious, when a group of five Saudis and an Egyptian helped him move his car and jump-start the engine.⁵

There have also been reports that at least three high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officials have visited Pakistan over the last four months to meet with representatives of al-Qa'ida.⁶

In addition to evidence linking Iraq to the September 11 attacks, there are indications that Baghdad may be responsible for the anthrax attacks that have occurred over the past month in the United States. The anthrax spores that were found in Senate Majority Leader Thomas Daschle's office earlier this month were treated with sophisticated chemical additives that enable the spores to remain suspended in the air. They could not have been developed in a cave. In fact, according to a report in the Washington Post, only three nations are believed to be capable of producing these chemicals: the United States, Russia and Iraq.⁷

Iraq, for the record, has vehemently denied involvement in either the September 11 attacks or the anthrax attacks.

The Bush Administration Divided

As more and more evidence of Iraqi complicity in the terror attacks in the US comes to light, officials in the Bush administration remain polarized into two camps. The first, headed by Secretary of State Colin Powell, has categorically rejected suggestions that Iraq may have played a role in the September 11 attacks. Powell and others have declined to name Iraq as a suspected sponsor of the attacks, ostensibly because sufficient evidence of its involvement has not come to light. In fact, it appears that fear of disrupting the Bush administration's anti-terrorism coalition is the primary concern at the State Department.

A dissident faction within the administration, led by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Lewis Libby, a key aide to Vice President Dick Cheney, have advocated expanding the war on terror to include Iraq. Wolfowitz and others feel that the attacks could not have been launched without state sponsorship and believe that, in any event, Iraq constitutes a much greater long-term threat to US national security than bin Laden's Al-Qa'ida network. In their view, the elimination of Iraq's clandestine nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons programs, which have proceeded unhindered since the 1998 expulsion of UN weapons inspectors, should be a top priority in the near future.

While President Bush has clearly avoided pointing the finger at Iraq, he has nevertheless alluded repeatedly to the fact that the war on terror will not necessarily be confined to Afghanistan. Earlier this month, US Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte delivered a letter to the Security Council stating that American self-defense could require "further actions with respect to other organizations and some states." While Iraq has been put on the back burner for the time being, military action against Baghdad has not been ruled out. It appears that the Bush administration is waiting until it has accumulated incontrovertible evidence of Iraqi involvement in terror attacks against the US before shifting the focus of its war on terror.

In fact, it appears that some high-ranking figures in the Bush administration may be quietly investigating claims made by Laurie Mylroie that Iraq masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. The most incriminating evidence produced by Mylroie in her book, Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America, concerns the identity of Ramzi Yousef, a Pakistani convicted of masterminding the 1993 attack. Yousef fled the US after the attack using a passport in the name of Abdul Basit Karim, a Pakistani resident of Kuwait. According to Mylroie, Iraqi intelligence altered files at Kuwait's interior ministry after the 1990 invasion in order to provide Yousef with a false identity.

Although the US Justice Department has long maintained that Yousef was, in fact, Abdul Basit, earlier this month former CIA director James Woolsey reportedly flew to London to determine whether Yousef's fingerprints match those of Abdul Basit, who lived in Britain during the 1980s. Although CIA and State Department officials are said to have been outraged by Woolsey's trip, the fact that he arrived on board a US government plane would appear to indicate that his investigation has been sanctioned by some in the Bush administration.⁸

Some who advocate a major military campaign against Iraq have cautioned against putting off action into the distant future. A military campaign to oust Saddam Hussein will undoubtedly be costly and therefore necessitate strong support from the American people. According to the results of a Reuters/Zogby poll released on October 25, 74% of Americans now believe that the US should expand the war on terrorism by targeting Saddam Hussein and 56% "strongly" favor such a policy. This degree of unqualified support for war against Iraq will not last forever.

Notes

  ¹ "Army alert by Saddam points to Iraqi role," The Sunday Telegraph (London), 23 September 2001.
  ² See "Hijack Suspect met Iraqi Agent in June 2000," The Wall Street Journal, 4 October 2000.
  ³ "Hard Questions About an Iraqi Connection," Newsweek, 29 October 2001.
  ⁴ Newsweek, 15 October 2001.
  ⁵ The Wall Street Journal-Europe, 22 October 2001.
  ⁶ The Sunday Telegraph (London), 23 September 2001.
  ⁷ "Additive Made Spores Deadlier," The Washington Post, 25 October 2001.
  ⁸ Knight-Ridder, 10 October 2001.
© 2001 Middle East Intelligence Bulletin. All rights reserved.

MEIB Main Page

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

SFG