Saddam and terrorism

The following are excerpts are from a recent article in the Wall Street Journal”

…a new Pentagon report suggests that Iraq's links to world-wide terror networks,
including al Qaeda, were far more extensive than previously understood.

The redacted version of "Saddam and Terrorism" is the most definitive public
assessment to date from the Harmony program, the trove of "exploitable" documents, audio and video records, and computer files captured in Iraq. On the
basis of about 600,000 items, the report lays out Saddam's willingness to use terrorism against American and other international targets, as well as his larger state sponsorship of terror, which included harboring, training and equipping jihadis throughout the Middle East.

According to a 1993 memo, Saddam decided to "form a group to start hunting Americans present on Arab soil; especially Somalia," where al Qaeda was then working with warlords against U.S. humanitarian forces.

The Harmony documents "reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda -- as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term version."

For 20 years, such "support" included using Fedayeen Saddam training camps to school terrorists, especially Palestinians but also non-Iraqis "directly associated" with al Qaeda, continuing up to the fall of Baghdad.

In July 2001, the regime began patronizing a terror cartel in Bahrain calling itself the Army of Muhammad, which, according to an Iraqi memo, "is under the wings of bin Laden."

The main Iraq intelligence failure was over WMD, but the report indicates that the CIA also underestimated Saddam's ties to global terror cartels. (Wall Street Journal, see insightful analysis on HotAir).

It is so easy to play Monday morning quarterback, but try to put yourself back before the war in Iraq. Iraq was in violation of UN directives. We had been negotiating with Iraq for 10 years. Sanctions were not working. In fact, they were starving the Iraqi people while making Saddam even more filthy rich than he already was.

Not only our own intelligence services, including the CIA, but virtually all our allies’ intelligence services were saying that Iraq still had WMD. That Iraq once had WMD and used them on their own people is not in dispute, so when Saddam refused to allow inspectors to visit certain sites, or regularly blocked the inspectors’ way long enough to remove the evidence, there was no reason to doubt that Saddam still had WMD. Although, this turned out to be a deliberate deception by Saddam Hussein himself, that fact that Saddam was an active, global sponsor of terror, as seen above, was right on the money.

If I had been President, I think I would have done some “shock and awe” on the imagined WMD sites as well as Saddam’s military. I think President Bush was wrong to launch an all-out invasion. But I think it could have been even have even more disastrous to have had a President like Barack Obama who would have sat on his hands while the Iraqi people suffered through years and years of more negotiations and sanctions.

What if the next country that supports terrorist networks really does have WMD? Do you really want a President who will wait until one or more of our major cities has been decimated before we do anything? What would you do?