Against my better judgement, I went to go see "Fahrenheight 9/11" over the weekend. While "Spider Man 2" was by far superior on any number of counts and I think that there's been more than enough discussion of the film in blogosphere in general and here on Winds of Change in particular, there was just one point of the film that I found deliciously ironic on so many levels:
Michael Moore basically agrees with many of the controversial conclusions of under secretary of defense for policy Douglas J. Feith, whose Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group is the source of one of Moore's key (though erroneously framed) premises - namely that a sizeable chunk of the Saudi royal family and key members of the Saudi business establishment, including members of the Bin Laden Group, were in cahoots with al-Qaeda.
And I very much doubt that Moore is alone in this regard.
One of the stronger criticisms that has been made against the administration as far as its handling of the war on terrorism is concerned is that Bush has more or less been treating al-Qaeda's Saudi backers with kid gloves. Similar remarks are sometimes made with regard to the Pakistani military-intelligence establishment, though most of the administration's more salient critics seem to at least recognize that General Musharraf is probably the best we're going to get as far as Pakistan is concerned for at least the immediate future. With the possible exception of Dennis Kucinich, I certainly don't recall any Democratic candidate calling for a withdrawl of US support to the Pakistani military government. So for the time being, let's just stick with the Saudis, shall we?
The Standard View
To put it quite simply, pre-9/11 a rather sizeable chunk of the United States intelligence community bought the idea that the Saudi royal family were nothing more than the intended victims of bin Laden's terror offensive. Al-Qaeda, or at least its Saudi wing, was seen as more or less an outgrowth of the anti-monarchist sentiments that had been building in the Kingdom for years. That Khalid al-Fawwaz, a top bin Laden lieutenant who was involved in the 1998 embassy bombings and is still fighting extradiction to the US, ran the avowedly anti-monarchist London office of the Advice and Reform Commission before his arrest by MI5 on September 28, 1998 did a great deal to strengthen this view within the US intelligence community.
Now, nobody in the CIA disputed throughout the late 1990s that bin Laden was an extremely popular man in the Kingdom. Indeed it has been a common tactic for the Saudi government or their preferred surrogates to argue that US support for the monarchy was all that kept the Kingdom from degenerating into an anti-Western Islamist theocracy in order to give US policy-makers an added incentive to support the Saudi monarchy. How this would be any different from the status quo, minus of course the presence of the princes, is a question that is well worth asking.
While there was an undeniable link between al-Qaeda and various Saudi charities that even prompted at one point a meeting between senior Saudi officials and then-Vice President Al Gore, up until 9/11 the intelligence agency was fairly willing to accept the standard Saudi claims that any Saudi money that did end up in al-Qaeda's hands was largely the result of unscrupulous individuals inside various charities (some of which were actual arms of the Saudi government) rather than the charities themselves.
The Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group
As this story from the New York Times makes fairly clear, shortly after September 11, Michael Maloof and David Wurmser started culling for the better part of a decade's worth of intelligence on al-Qaeda and its activities, with particular emphasis on its state sponsors outside of Afghanistan's ruling Taliban.
As the Times piece explains:
The team's conclusions were alarming: old barriers that divided the major Islamic terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, Hamas and Hezbollah, were coming down, and these groups were forging ties with one another and with secular Arab governments in an emerging terrorist war against the West.
Their analysis covered plenty of controversial ground. The two men identified members of the Saudi royal family who they said had aided Al Qaeda over the years. They warned that Al Qaeda had operatives in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, where they were establishing ties with the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. They suspected Abu Nidal, an aging Palestinian terrorist leader living in Baghdad, of being an indirect link between Iraq and Al Qaeda, even though many other analysts believed that he was essentially retired and that his once-fearsome organization had been shattered. Mr. Nidal died under mysterious circumstances in Baghdad in 2002.
Now I want to be absolutely clear before proceeding onwards, because this is something that is all too often missed among Feith's detractors, particularly those who want to accuse him of manipulating intelligence with respect to Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda:
If you believe that there are members of the Saudi royal family or Saudi business magnates who are in cahoots with bin Laden, you accept that conclusions of Maloof and Wurmser.
They were the first ones to come to this conclusion, and they reached it in November 2001. That was months before Abu Zubaydah's capture and subsequent interrogation in March 2002, in which he more or less spilled the beans concerning the connection between 3 senior Saudi princes (Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul Aziz, Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, and Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Khabir) and al-Qaeda. You can read all about that in Gerald Posner's book.
I should add, incidentally, that there are still quite a few people within the intelligence community who hold to the same position that I outlined earlier, t5hat the Saudis are simply intended victims and nothing more. Perhaps that's why the first clue to the general public that the Saudis probably weren't such nice guys came from from Rand Corporation analyst Laurent Murawiec on August 6, 2002, and not from any official assessment of the intelligence community (The War Against the Terror Masters, which contains much the same information, was not published until September 10, 2002).
Murawiec, incidentally, was part of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, which until recently also included Richard Perle, the key figure in all variants of the neoconservative cabal conspiracy theory.
Understanding the Saudis and the Counter Terrorism Analysis Group
So what's my point on all of this? The original analysis that led to the opinion (largely verified by what we know now, I would argue) that Saudi regime is:
[a] Not our friend; and
[b] Has been far more than tacitly complicit in a lot of the crap that's occurred in terms of the rise of Sunni extremism over the last 20-30 years; and
© In many cases continues to be complicit, as can be seen from all of the wonderful work that the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) is now doing in places like Fallujah these days.
Or let's take for example Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, bin Laden's brother-in-law who has been financing militant Islamist activities in the Philippines ever since 1988, including the proto-9/11 Oplan Bojinka. He was arrested shortly after 9/11 by Saudi authorities, but was subsequently released and to this day remains a free man in the Kingdom with full access to his finances and extensive network of Islamist NGOs. No doubt this is a great comfort to all of the people that Abu Sayyaf and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front have murdered over the last decade.
The case of Khalifa is just one of many that I could point out as far as Saudi activities in this regard are concerned. We could always get into little details like IIRO Pankisi Gorge helping to finance Khattab's invasion of Dagestan in 1999, or the more recent series of wackiness surrounding the death of Paul Johnson and the subsequent amnesty offer to Saudi al-Qaeda members. I can go on, but I think that readers are getting my point.
Oddly, the same people who seem more than willing to accept the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group's conclusions with respect to Saudi Arabia will vehemently argue against doing the same with regard to Iraq and al-Qaeda (or Iran depending on where you work, but that's another post altogether).
This is so despite the fact that in my view the conclusions of Maloof and Wurmser as stated above have held up to the letter: Saudi royals have funded al-Qaeda, the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein al-Hilweh in particular has degenerated into an al-Qaeda haven, and al-Qaeda has had a standing alliance with Hezbollah ever since 1993. If anybody wants to dispute any of that, I'll be more than happy to take them up on any of those particular subjects.
This is one of the reasons why the administration was so willing to accept their Iraq analysis over others that were presented at the time: to be quite frank, Maloof and Wurmser got right in one fell stroke what other analysts had been getting wrong for literally years on end.
Interpreting Data
Now then, one of the things I will be quite up front about is that there are multiple ways at looking at various sets of data. This is one of the reasons why, for example, Richard Clarke in his book, for example, fully allows for the possibility that Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were working with Oklahoma City bomber Terry Nichols in the Philippines, a notion that I'm certain would be considered the last refuge of utter kookdom were it repeated by yours truly.
Having a better understanding of how this works actually being inside the Beltway and talking with various people here (and I'll be quite honest - I've learned more about US politics in 1 month at AEI than in 2 years of political science courses), I'm a lot more aware now of how people came to different conclusions concerning Iraq and al-Qaeda within the US government. What I think needs to be understood, however, is to begin with the assumption of good motives.
Suffice it to say that there is more than enough evidence available to support any given conclusion that one might desire to entertain concerning any number of complex issues, like say Iraq and al-Qaeda. The problem as far as policy-makers or the broader intelligence community are concerned then, comes to the issue of making a judgement call. Unfortunately, given the charged political atmosphere that exists within Washington these days, what is all too frequent an occurence is that the people who lose the policy debate have a nasty way of going to the press in order to receive a sympathetic airing of the dissenting view to the general public.
Another common tactic (and Winds of Change commenter praktike hit it right on the money when he recognized that a lot of these "former officials" are really pretty much the same group of people, some of which have axes of their own to grind - it might be helpful the next time you see Patrick Lang quoted, for example, to keep in mind that he is currently a foreign agent of the Lebanese government) is to bring individuals who used to serve in government and are now outspoken on any number of issues (Lang, for example, supports Jayna Davis's work on the Oklahoma City bombing) but are able to hide further scrutiny of their identities by expressing their opinion on these subjects anonymously.
This has nothing to do with conservativism or liberalism, incidentally, it's simply the way that Washington operates. The right does it, the left does it, it's a problem, and I don't foresee any way of changing this in the future.
As I said, the best way to approach this kind of information is understand that there numerous ways of looking at any given set of data. Things that are often caricatured as insane (such as Clarke or Lang's rather interesting assessments of the Oklahoma City bombing), tend to look quite different when approached with a more open mind - and that counts every bit as much against the connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda as it does for it.
One point I do want to drive home, however, is that those who are so willing to accept Maloof and Wurmser when it comes to Saudi Arabia might well do be a little more charitable towards them with regard to Iraq, given that there are every bit as many arguments to be made for or against al-Qaeda collaboration with Saudi Arabia inside the intelligence community as there ever were with al-Qaeda and Iraq. I'm not advocating agnosticism in these particular areas (though this seems to be a pretty good position to hold with respect to data in general, as Fred Pruitt says, "I'm prepared to believe 10 impossible things every day") as my views on these subjects are fairly well known, but there are benefits to keeping an open mind with respect to this stuff.
Oh, and some other stuff ...
As long as we're on the subject of intelligence, I just thought I'd make some other passing observations. The first is that while deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and other prominent neocons have been widely criticized for their optimistic assessment of post-war Iraq, one thing that hasn't gotten nearly as much note is that this was pretty much the same thing that the intelligence community believed at the time of the war and all Wolfowitz and others were doing was simply airing these assessments to the public (no doubt apologies will be in order from all those who have routinely accused Wolfowitz and his colleagues of acting solely on the basis of ideology without considering the intelligence on this one).
I also notice that in the same news story somebody decided to leak two key items of note, though bits and pieces of this have also appeared in other media outlets:
- US intelligence put forth a report suggesting that US territory could be attacked by Iraq prior to the war. It doesn't get into specifics on this one, but if you combine this with what Putin recently decided to go public with as well as Zarqawi and other factors that policy-makers had to consider prior to the war, it should give you at least some idea as far as what the intelligence actually said.
- Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard commanders now in US custody have stated that they were under the quite sincere belief that adjacent units possessed WMD. If you remember hearing about that infamous "red line" outside of Baghdad, that's where a lot of this comes from.
- About the one thing that everyone in Washington does seem to agree on these days is that most of the surviving al-Qaeda leadership is currently in Iran, though there seem to be a number of different opinions on how to deal with them. Some folks, particularly in the State Department, seem to be of the opinion that they can actually get Iran to hand these people over at some unspecified point in the future, though I'll be quite honest and say that by my reckoning any chance of that happening after the hardliners' victory in the recent
riggedelections. The other thing I've heard here that I find highly disturbing is this misguided belief that Rafsanjani and Co will rein al-Qaeda in, order at least keep them from launching major attacks on the United States in the immediate future for fear of a US retaliation.
You'll forgive me for being somewhat skeptical of Rafsanjani and his ilk as far as their willingness to restrain themselves as far as terrorism is concerned, particularly if the mullahs get their hands on the bomb.
Dan! How could you give money to that fat pig! After Bowling I could not be forced to sit through another such glut of idiocy, even for free!
"Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard commanders now in US custody have stated that they were under the quite sincere belief that adjacent units possessed WMD."
Well, yah. The MOP alarms were going off every half hour, there was eo-overhead of Guard units rolling out drums of something, and traces of VX and Saurin were found in the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This is anecdotal, I watched every minute, because we had eight foot snowdrifts in Colorado for the whole 'Dash through the Desert'. IMHO, Saddam used the oil trench fires to burn up any stockpiled chemical agents in the vicinity-- why else the fires? Uncle Saddam surely bought enough Russian radars to know that SAR sees through smoke, no problem.
So are we screwed wrt Iran, or are there some actual (non-wishful) initiatives brewing in the administration? There hasn't been a peep in the news.
I can't believe they can get away with lying low on this stuff until after the election, with Iranian provocations getting worse by the day. If he allows Iran to become NK2, Bush is done.
Someone: What exactly are our options with reguards to Iran? I see it as a holding game where we hope student and population unrest builds enough to depose the mullahs-- or maybe a Libyan style catipulation (unlikely). Most probably we are doing what we can.
Never, never, lay the blame for NK at GW's door. Impeached president Clinton played footsie with Kim Jong Il for 6 years, hoping for that Nobel Peace Prize, while Kim built TWO (yes, two, I worked on the site models!) full-up nuclear enrichment plants and offed three million + citizens in the death camps.
jinnderella:
My understanding is that it was mainly cyanide and other chemicals that were found in the Euphrates river than anything else. The real mystery, now that we're actually finding chemical shells, is why this stuff wasn't used during the war.
someone:
I would rather tend to agree on the subject of Iran. There is some serious planning that is going on under the radar, but the fact that you can find far more of an audience in Washington these days to rail against neocons than you will to rail against Tehran. You tell me which group Saif al-Adel and Co are shacking up with.
Blame about North Korea aside, the US right now needs to put forth the same kind of anti-regime efforts that we did as far as the Soviet Bloc states are concerned during the Cold War. If you think that this is a worthwhile venture, then I would advise you to contact your representatives in Congress to support such things. And no, I don't mean the Mujahideen-e-Khalq or any of their US-based symbionts.
Dan: I think we got there too fast-- Rummy's brilliant plan made deployment of non-conventional weapons infeasible. Saddam never really believed that the US would attack him, up until the last minute. And then the obligatory pounding from the air was supposed to take a few weeks, at least. Also I believe the French told Saddam they could preserve his regime if no chemical weapons were found. A bit of wishful thinking.
Did you mark also the MOP alarms going off constantly? That would have been consistant with ongoing destruction of stockpiles.
Re. Iraqi chemical weapons: I've stopped being surprised by the Reuters (et al.) boilerplate in most articles on the subject that reads something like, "...since, despite Washington's best efforts, no Iraqi WMDs have been found." It would be factual if they and others noted that "the expected massive stockpiles of battlefield-ready WMDs have not been found."
Duelfer, Kay, even (that pompous clown) Blix have repeatedly reported on evidence of Iraqi noncompliance with the WMD-related terms of the 1991 Armistice, on missile stockpiles and hidden active missile programs, on hidden dormant nuclear and biological programs, and on discoveries of individual chemical shells and groups of small numbers of chemical shells. And camoflauged bunkers with dozens of drums of organophosphate pesticides on Iraqi army bases.
For the past few months, the common pattern seems to be that breaking news reports of discoveries of chemical shells are followed by a series of statements by parts of the Coalition military establishment (CENTCOM/Baghdad, the Pentagon, field commanders, partners' field and HQ spokespeople). These statements are often inconsistent with one another in terms of what was found and what test results indicate. Blaster has followed a number of these incidents in detail.
I take this recurring circumstance to be indicative of either (1) Coalition incompetence as far as the chain-of-command getting its story straight, or (2) of a willingness on the part of higher-ups to see the prominence of chemical-weapons stories kept to a minimum in the world press. I couldn't say what strategic reasoning would support alternative #2.
Glad to see my views are sinking in!
In any case, this is a good post, but, as I'm sure you're aware, the weakness in your argument is right here:
If you believe that there are members of the Saudi royal family or Saudi business magnates who are in cahoots with bin Laden, you accept that [sic] conclusions of Maloof and Wurmser.
Why? I don't think it logically follows, and any philosophy professor would tell you the same thing.
But nevertheless, I do believe you have a good working explanation as to why leaks happen. People lose arguments, and they air their disagreements in public, via sympathetic ex-officials who may or may not have their own agendas. Btw, there may be a story coming out soon about these guys. Should be interesting.
By the way, Dan: earlier you wrote about how a fair accounting of the history of Al Qaeda needs to address US support for Islamic radicals during the Afghan war. Fair enough, but let's go back a bit further to the contest of wills between Saud and Faisal to look into how the Saudis and the US supported the Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser and Arab nationalists generally. That might even provide some clues as to how their might be latent institutional support for Al Qaeda within the royal family. Maybe this can even be traced from the 50s/60s to the present day.
On an unrelated topic, do you think the Yezidis were the "cult" described in Woodward's book as the CIA's intelligence network in the runup to the Iraq war?
Dan Darling wrote:
Regarding North Korea and not to turn this into a partisan shooting match, I think that Bush by opting for multilateral negotiations (including China, South Korea, and Japan) rather than the bilateral approach favored by Clinton-Carter (and Kerry too incidentally) is probably more likely to get positive results especially if we can get China to help apply pressure on North Korea.
I am curious though if anyone believes that a bilateral approach between just the United States and North Korea is the better policy.Thorley Winston (5:34pm):
I won't go off-topic except to say that it's fallacious to suppose that "we" can routinely get "them" (in your case, the Norks) to do "the right thing," if only we frame the issue correctly. The corrolary is that a bad outcome is evidence of incompetence or worse.
The Norks and for that matter the Wahhibis in the Saud royal family have their own histories, perspectives, moral codes, etc. American desires are just one piece of their puzzles. Sadly, in some cases there is no "getting to Yes" through negotiations, at least to a Yes that still accords with the objectives that we brought to the table in the first place. "Less bad than the alternatives" will be as good as it gets in some cases.
jinnderella: I'm not blaming Bush for NK, far from it. But if he gets played by the mullahs as Clinton did by Li'l Kim, he's toast.
It seems to me, as Trent Telenko pointed out here some months ago, that Iranian internal unrest has already shown itself to be a failure -- the mullahs have demonstrated that they have the will and means to beat down whatever forces the students et al. can muster.
Which leaves... What? I dunno, but Bush should be talking about this stuff.
Just by talking about Iran Bush could be toast. Everyone with a brain has to know that somethings got to be done about Iraq and Syria. However, I can hardly stand to imagine the screeching if the Pres started talking about doing something, anything, not even necessarily direct military action. Nope, anything with Iran has to be under the radar untill after the elections, why else would we tolerate them shelling checkpoints on the border?
As for NK, why should we go just Bilateral, we're half a world away, why not make the immediate neighbors take some of the heat? To me, this policy says much to undermine the whole US bully, go it alone campaign going on. There is no benefit to a more multilateral approach to the war on terror, just as there is no benefit to a bilateral approach to North Korea. The surrounding states have much more at stake in that situation than we do.
Chads
jinderella:
The leadership of the Republican Guard believed that chemical weapons had been deployed at the time of the invasion and there were even intercepted Iraqi orders in which Saddam Hussein gave his generals command authority over when to fire said weapons. This is one of the reasons that the administration and the US foreign policy establishment was so cavalier as far as their belief that Iraq possessed WMDs goes - there were literally dozens of NSA intercepts to that effect, and not all of them from low or mid-level people in the regime hierarchy. There is even an order that was issued by Saddam Hussein immediately after the US bombing began ordering a chemical attack on Kuwait.
Also, Saddam Hussein had slipped rather far into his own meglomania by the time the war started, though those delusions unfortunately didn't carry through to other key people in the regime like Habbush and al-Douri. Saddam believed, for example, that the main thrust of the US attack into Iraq was going to come through Jordan and that his Franco-Russian allies would be able to exert enough diplomatic pressure against the US to prevent any serious assault on his regime. Habbush and al-Douri, however, weren't so convinced and decided making plans for either a reconquest of the majority of the country (essentially a replay of the 1991 uprising) or an entrenched guerrilla campaign.
There also haven't been any corroborated accounts that WMDs were destroyed prior to the war, though some scientist were told to destroy documents and other potentially valuable information.
AMac:
Reuters still believes that bin Laden is merely "blamed" for 9/11, so their editorial coverage on this particular subject is hardly rather surprising.
Duelfer, who is considered the final authority for me (and the US government, which is why he's in charge of the Iraq Survey Group) on all things related to Iraqi WMD, has stated up-front that we have several dozen chemical shells containing both mustard and sarin gas and even without these there is still what is in my view an overwhelming case to be made that Iraq was not in compliance with the Gulf War cease-fire, nor did it have any intention of doing so.
Praktike:
I very much enjoy your commentary and I hope that our discussions have been mutually beneficial. Hopefully the reverse is also true ;)
The point that I was trying to make is more or less that most individuals who accept the premise that the Saudis are more or less bad guys also accept the conclusions that Maloof and Wurmser reached in their research on the subject, even if they are unaware of it. There are certainly a number of arguments, erroneous in my view, that run against the whole idea that the Saudi royals are in cahoots with al-Qaeda. Indeed, it is the mere existence of these arguments that tend to keep our "special relationship" with the Saudis from going completely down the tubes in addition to their notable entourage of paid shills here in the Beltway.
As far as ex-officials or current officials are concerned, it's not just that they air their disagreements in public that seems to be so much of a problem as it is that they demagogue or caricature the other side to make it appear completely irrational. To use a fairly dated example, there are still any number of completely intelligent people who believe that it was Iran or Syria rather than Libya that blew up Pan Am Flight 103, though the majority of the evidence in the intelligence community tends to head strongly towards that direction. Similarly, there are people who believe quite sincerely that Hezbollah and Imad Mugniyeh did not have a role in the bombing of the US marine barracks in Beirut. Now I disagree with both views rather strongly, but I don't think that one should start with the assumption of just because they believe this means that they are necessarily cranks and wackos (well, some of them are this too, but not because of their opinions on these particular issues).
Your recommendation concerning looking into the US supporting the Muslim Brotherhood against Nasser sounds like a fairly good one. I also think that serious attention needs to be focused on post-1989 support for al-Qaeda in Balkans during the early 1990s and was extremely disappointed that the 9/11 commission didn't bother to look into it. Then again, as you are no doubt aware, I have rather significant problems with the way the commission went about doing its work.
That's certainly plausible as far as the Yazidis are concerned, since the only possible candidate that comes immediately to mind would be the Kakai.
someone:
Currently it's just the students against the mullahs and they have little if any outside support. The European governments that like to speak quite fondly of human rights when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are curiously silent on the subject of Iran and they certainly don't have anything resembling what the anti-apartheid groups used to have. To put it bluntly, nobody gives a shit about Iran among the people who should which is why the students are so hamstrung right now. If you think that should change, then contact your representative in Congress and let them no how you feel.
Thorley: I would think that China is definitely our go-to guy in the North Korea situation. They've been the glue holding that part of the world for most of the past 5,000 or so years (give or take a millenium, I guess), and they have the most to lose from a nuclefied NK selling arms to terrorists. With their own routine terrorism issues, I would think they'd be all too happy to put the right sort of pressure on Kim Jong Il if allowed to exert their own brand of diplomacy ;)
The problem of al-Quaeda laying low in Iran was a major qualm I had with us going into Iraq (and Afghanistan, too, for that matter) in the early goings. It's not as if taking down one, two, three, or even four Middle Eastern regimes would really prevent any of the other governments from sheltering them...rather, it'll steel them against helping us in any way. While it's more dangerous now for the terrorist cowards to move freely, they'll still have a political teat to hang on to, if only for the nonce.
It's now become a game of how thin we want to stretch ourselves, militarily and politically...problem is, we don't have the audacity or, more importantly, the means necessary to secure acquiescence from Iran. And the damning part of this is that I know it, everyone here knows it, and, worst of all, they know it. At this point, we're down to economic sanctions (whoop de-flippin'-do).
During the hostage crisis, Reagan's inaugeration proved what it was that extremists positively respond to--the threat of force. But we're no longer in the position to evince that now. We're back at square one, with only Carterian methods available to us. So unless someone else (from within Iran, as mentioned earlier) is able to put pressure on them independent of the U.S., I don't see the situation changing one iota.
About Iran , just connect the dots.
1. Iran is actively pursueing nuke manufacture.
2. Hezbollah-Al Qaeda links bloom in Palestinian refugee camps
3. Iranian mullahcracy will hang on to power by killing and maiming, forever if need be.
4. A dirty bomb in the hands of terrorists targetting Israel is Tel Aviv's biggest nightmare.
5. WMD supplied by Iran to Al Qaeda meant for Israel would give Tehran enough deniability (within the Arab world at least).
What happens when we connect the dots? Simple, Israel moves unilaterally to take out Tehran's Nuke facilities, consequences be damned. Of course the US gets slight advance warning and winks in response.
The arab world erupts in their usual, impotent outrage. Tehran comes out with major sabre rattling, may even declare war on israel but not sharing boerders with Israel is effectively impotent. Regime change in tehran via a new revolution receives its biggest boost in years. Seems far fetched but it was the most likely event sequence I could think of.
Dan: I agree, but evidence of destruction of stockpiles would have been hard to come by during the maelstrum of the Fall of Baghdad. So, I am curious also-- given that they had something, did members of the chain of command defy Saddam's orders? I remember there was to be heavy punishment by the coalition for use of non-conventional weapons.
Someone: I went back and read Trent's "Spoiling Attack". For something written in April it is still amazingly pertinent.
Amac: Thanx for the awesome linkage! I had not read Blaster before.
Sud Voly: If you read the Wash Post article Colt linked up top, the mullahs are two years out from joining club nuke-- how does that affect your connect the dots scenario?
the mullahs are two years out from joining club nuke
I think all such estimates of how long we have left are pure baloney, part of the diplomatic kabuki. The mullahs have the bomb whenever they want it - they certainly have the know-how, and just maybe the Bam quake was an underground test (geophysics expertise welcome here...). Iran now is like North Korea before October 2002 - they're part of the club, but it's in no-one's interest to say so.
I have been pondering for some time what the US strategic stance towards Iran and North Korea must be. I work on the assumption that 9/11 was Iraq, that the other two weren't involved, but that they do have the power to inflict WMD terrorism should they desire. Iraq really did cross the line, so Saddam had to go. But how do you deal with the others, for whom WMD terrorism apparently remains a deterrent capability only? If you start gnawing away at that capability ('preemption'), you risk triggering its use! So it's more of a cold war against Iran and North Korea.
But Iran remains a special problem because it's right next door to Iraq, and very involved in the affairs of that country, and in the affairs of Al Qaeda. Presumably there remains a threat that remnants of the Iraqi SSO will hand Iraqi chemical or biological weapons over to Al Qaeda. Iran is in a position to hear about such offers, even to run a sting if it wishes. On the other hand, if (say) there was a major anthrax attack in the USA, Iran might be in serious trouble. So all those Al Qaeda guests/hostages the IRGC is hosting are liabilities as well as assets. But then Iran has its nuclear deterrent. Would Washington go after Iran in the event of an Iraqi-enabled anthrax attack, just to maintain the fiction that the Iraq/AQ connection was a mysterious and tenuous one, and risk getting nuked by Hezbollah? And would Teheran dare to enable a biological attack by Al Qaeda, given the security of its nuclear deterrent? The game theorists at Fort Meade must be busy.
Mitch: You said:
"The game theorists at Fort Meade must be busy."
That reminded me of something from wargames 101-- there is a strategy that can be employed before a Preemptive Strike, called Agressive Deterrent-- maybe that is the answer for derailing the Iranian nuke program. It would not involve actually taking out the hardened reactors, and the extensive loss of civilian life that would entail, but it could send a 'message' to Tehran.
I'm not sure Tehran has the capability to make weaponized anthrax. I'll have to research it.
By "enabling a biological attack", I didn't actually mean directly supplying biological weapons, but rather facilitating the human component of such an attack. Assume for a moment that Iraq was indeed behind 9/11 and the anthrax letters. Al Qaeda was evidently not given the means to carry out a full-scale anthrax attack within the USA - just enough to demonstrate its possibility. Both Al Qaeda and the Iraqi intelligence apparatus are much weaker than they were, but they remain active and in theory could still bring off such an attack - they'd just need to get a few appropriately trained and armed operatives into the country. Iran could help them do it, by acting as a go-between, running interference, etc. - that's what I meant.
Mitch P. (#24019)
I think the idea that Iran was behind both 9/11 and the anthrax letters is (to be polite) a huge stretch. I've seen nothing that would even remotely justify that.
Your point about how Iran could assist with WMD terrorist attacks if it wished is probably about right, however - and FYI, Iranian intelligence has NOT declined in strength.
Scott Wiggins:
The Chinese hardliners very much support Kim Jong Il (though they recognize that he's crazy) as a way to keep US influence limited to South Korea and Japan. The pragmatists more less look the other way on this one because this is their way of shutting the hardliners up while they more or less privatize the Chinese economy. The fact is that without regular fuel and food shipments North Korea would have collapsed over the last 2 years and it is impossible to imagine that Chinese could execute regime change in Pyongyang at their leisure in the event they ever desired to.
They don't, which is basically why we're in the situation we are now.
As far as Iran is concerned, we don't have the troops, pure and simple. And economic sanctions have existed on Iran since the mid-1990s - they were put in place by the Clinton administration. Not that it matters, as nobody in the EU pays much attention to such things. Even the Italians, who are by far the most hawkish on Iran of the major EU nations, are still more than willing to allow their corporations to do business to the mullahs for fear of it going to German competitors.
Sud Voly:
1. Correct.
2. Al-Qaeda fighters have been training in Hezbollah camps in the Bekaa Valley (along with every other terrorist group in existence) since 1993. There are Palestinian al-Qaeda fighters in the form of Asbat al-Ansar in Ein al-Hilweh, but I haven't seen anything definitive that they're coordinating operations with Hezbollah. The idea that they might, however, has been a nightmare for US intelligence since 9/11 given the extent and sophistication of the latter group.
3. Quite right. The Baseej, Hizb-e-Ansar, and other imported thugs were certainly out in force yesterday to beat up the student demonstrators.
4. Substitute "dirty" for "nuclear" and I think you'll be closer to the money.
5. Iran is more likely to supply any nuclear weapons that it produces to Hezbollah rather than to al-Qaeda for a number of reasons. The problem with Iran going nuclear with respect to al-Qaeda is that it gives the leadership figures a place of relative sanctuary from which to plan long-term, which is bad for a whole number of reasons.
Iran has learned from the mistakes of Saddam Hussein's regime and has diversified their nuclear sites to the point where unless all of them can be neutralized in one fell swoop the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons remains. And unlike Iraq, which was involved in a very bloody war with Iran when Israel bombed Osirak, Iran is more than able to fire a volley of Shahab-3s Israel's way.
jinnderella:
Iran is currently where North Korea was in 1993, or more or less at the point when they can produce nuclear weapons at their leisure and the only question that needs to be asked is what kind.
As far as the Iraqi military officers are concerned, and I expect that this'll be in the Senate intel committee report, they each believed that it was their peers' units, rather than their own, which possessed such weaponry. So if there was some last-minute decision not to use such weaponry, it hasn't come out in the interrogations of former Republican Guard and Special Republican Guard commanders.
mitch:
I'm fairly certain that the Bam quake was not a covert testing of an Iranian nuclear weapon. The regime got a fair amount flack for what happened there and was even forced to accept relief aid from the Great Satan. Neither of which are particularly flattering if the mullahs are now a nuclear power.
9/11 is considered the work of al-Qaeda by the administration, with the primary issue focusing around who assisted them in carrying out such an attack. There are people in Washington who believe that Iraq, Iran, or Saudi Arabia were involved in the attacks to some extent or another. Others refuse to accept any state sponsorship solution.
The US has been fighting a cold war with Iran since 1979.
The threat that currently exists is not so much that the Baathist remnants ally with al-Qaeda, the al-Douri faction has already folded into the network (and as a subordinate party, which is a rather large problem with a lot of these "Mukhabarat as evil mastermind" scenarios), which is how the Poles found those shells that al-Qaeda was attempting to purchase from a number of rather shady third parties.
I've just finished the Jayna Davis book. I watched the evening cable news and all the talk on the so-called 9-11 commission completely missed the issue of 9-11 and focused on Iraq and WMD. It's true there has been an appalling mess of intelligence; but if the FBI had followed through on all she reports 9-11 might have been prevented AND there would not be another conspiracy theory that is going to live forever.
We needed information, we needed direction and what we have is politicians playing games with our lives and lives of our servicemen. I am of an age I won't live long enough to see civilization dip back into the dark ages but I think if we aren't careful that is what is going to happen.
Can't some of you have have a larger voice than mine DO SOMETHING?
Joe (#24020):
I think the idea that Iran was behind both 9/11 and the anthrax letters is (to be polite) a huge stretch.
That's not what I was saying. The scenario is: Iraq was behind both; the anthrax letters were a threat to mount a 9/11-scale operation using anthrax; the threat has now been considerably degraded; but in theory Iran could step in, pick up the pieces, and make it happen.
Do you think the idea that Iraq "was behind both... is a big stretch"?
Given that "WTC 1993" and Bojinka both failed, but 9/11 succeeded, and probably involved sophisticated counterintelligence, I think it quite possible that the first two were sponsored by Iraq alone, but that the third had some extra input. But as for why I insist on the link to Iraq at all... well, WTC 1993 took place on the second anniversary of Iraq's defeat; the guys who got away were an Iraqi and a Kuwaiti collaborator using an Iraqi alias; when the follow-up Day of Terror plot was exposed a few months later, the country whose intelligence headquarters Clinton chose to bomb was Iraq.
Dan (#24023):
As far as Iran is concerned, we don't have the troops, pure and simple.
In his chapter on the "almost war" with Iran in 1996, Richard Clarke runs through a number of options, one of which is outright invasion (called the "Eisenhower Option", I forget why).
the al-Douri faction has already folded into the network
Ironic observation about Izzat Ibrahim: he has red hair, right? That means he has "crusader blood" - there must be a European ancestor in there somewhere.
Ruth H: Can't some of you.. DO SOMETHING?
Well, if someone wants to make "Fahrenheit 7/17" into a movie...
1. I see no real reason to believe that "the Saudi royal family" is monolithic. As I understand it, they're split into Wahhabist and moderate factions. They're not our friends and they're not our enemies: it's a mixed bag. So it seems perfectly reasonable to maintain a relationship with them if they can be of at least some use to us. Same goes for Pakistan.
2. China is not our friend with respect to N. Korea. Any idea that we can talk our way out of that situation (or the Iranian situation) is silly. This isn't a friendly chat over where to go for lunch.
mitch:
The Clinton administration and much of the US foreign policy establishment believed that it was possible to negotiate with the "moderate" President Khatami following his election under the belief that through engagement we can rein in Iran's regional ambitions. This is still the prevailing wisdom throughout much of Europe, though I think the recent "elections" in Iran opened more than a few eyes inside even the State Department.
As to al-Douri, yes, he does have European blood in his family, as does his entire tribe. This is not all that uncommon an occurence inside Iraq, either.
jhclouse:
1. The entire Saudi royal family opted to start paying what essentially amounted to protection money to al-Qaeda starting in 1991, with Prince Turki serving as the middleman. The rift only started to form after King Fahd's stroke and al-Qaeda's attacks inside the Kingdom in 1995 and 1996, the latter with substantial Iranian backing. The analyst wing of the CIA has rather substantial problems with accepting this.
2. Agreed.
The more I learn, the more 1990s terrorism against the USA looks like Iraq, pure and simple. Khobar Towers bombing - happened just as the Mukhabarat were pulling apart an attempted INA coup, that had been the great hope for unseating Saddam in 1996. TWA Flight 800 - July 17, Revolution Day in Iraq. According to Bodansky, the downing of Flight 800 was claimed by the "Islamic Change Movement", along with the 1995-1996 bombings in Saudi Arabia, and they promised a fourth event very shortly. Ten days later came the Atlanta Olympics bombing. African embassy bombings - they took place on August 7, 1998, the day before Victory Day, the tenth anniversary of Iraq's "victory" over Iran.
The entire Saudi royal family opted to start paying what essentially amounted to protection money to al-Qaeda starting in 1991, with Prince Turki serving as the middleman.
My knowledge on this is a bit sketchy (haven't gotten the opportunity to do all the reading I should) but hasn't this situation been going on since the end of the 19th century? I had the impression that there were moderates in the house of Saud all during that period (in addition to extremists) and that these moderates were more than a little peeved at having to protect and pay off a bunch of thugs.
And what about the old favorite of the Left that the Bush family is great friends with Prince Abdullah? Is there any truth to that? If so, and if Prince Abdullah is a Wahhabist, why would he even talk to a Westerner, much less become close friends with them?
I just have this feeling that it's simply not possible for everybody over there to want us all dead. I've even read some accounts that lead me to believe that plenty of Saudis (both in and out of government) hate the extremists.
Any further thoughts or clarification?
mitch:
Khobar Towers was Iran/al-Qaeda and the fact that the Iraqi Mukhabarat was so busy busting up the INA coup attempt is actually an argument against their involvement in this respect. As for TWA 800, there's a lot of circumstantial evidence there to the point where it's basically where Pan Am 103 would have been if the Libyans had pulled it off as they had originally planned - i.e. far too much is missing for us to do a genuine analysis of the plane like we did at Lockerbie. If somebody did bomb Pan Am 103, then they should be laughing it up right now that they were able to fool one of the most resourceful and diligent investigations on the planet.
The Atlanta Olympics bombing was perpetrated by a known domestic extremist and of course there is an overwhelming body of evidence, including a failed suicide bomber, which supports the mainstream allegation that al-Qaeda rather than Iraq perpetrated the 1998 embassy bombings. I'm not aware of anyone, even Mylroie, who supports the position that either of these two incidents were perpetrated by the former Iraqi regime.
You appear to be basing a good chunk of your conclusions largely on the basis of dates rather than on detailed forensic and HUMINT reporting that appears to run counter to your preferred conclusions, particularly with respect to Khobar Towers, the Atlanta Olympics bombing, and the embassy bombings and I would strongly suggest you redress them on this one.
jhclouse:
"My knowledge on this is a bit sketchy (haven't gotten the opportunity to do all the reading I should) but hasn't this situation been going on since the end of the 19th century?"
With respect to the al-Saud clan paying off the Wahhabi religious establishment? Pretty much. Al-Qaeda, however, is a more recent and far more lethal phenomenon.
Even the moderate wing of the Saudi dynasty has supported Wahhabism and continues to do so, which is one of the reasons why the royal family continues to. The moment this arrangement changes, I assure you, the princes will be the first ones to know.
Crown Prince Abdullah is, to be quite honest, little more than a passing acquaintance of the president. Prince Bandar is another matter altogether and is a subject of great frustration for myself and others like me who wish to have Wahhabi influence extricated from our government.
Saudis, like any other group of people, think a great many things about a great many issues and the United States is no exception to this. The religious leadership, however, very much does wish us ill, as do the various magnates who support them and the estimated several thousand to tens of thousands of Saudi al-Qaeda members and sympathizers. I doubt that everyone in Germany wanted the Jews dead either, but there were unfortunately enough. The same is true of the Magic Kingdom.
Dan:
I'll start by putting this in some context. I believe that in his chapter on the embassy bombings, Richard Clarke says that there had previously been eleven "terrorist" (his quotes) events that came to the attention of the White House. He then lists nine, and I will use these as a quasi-objective inventory of anti-American terrorism in the early 1990s. He lists:- Four events in 1993: Mir Aimal Kansi's CIA gatehouse shooting spree; the World Trade Center bombing; the attempt to assassinate George Bush Sr in Kuwait; the July 4 "Day of Terror" plot.
- Five events in 1995-1996: the Oklahoma City bombing; the Riyadh and Dhahran (Khobar Towers) bombings; the destruction of TWA Flight 800; the Atlanta Olympics bombing.
Clarke lists the disparate perpetrators in order to make the point that there wasn't much of a pattern. However, it is not hard to tie them all together, in a way that revolves around Iraq.First, 1993. Mylroie suggests that Kansi (a Pashtun from Pakistani Baluchistan) was testing the escape route that would be used by Ramzi Yousef. In her AEI book, she also asserts that the Day of Terror plot was essentially a sting run by the FBI in the same milieu (Al Farooq mosque) that Ramzi Yousef had operated in (I believe this is what Sheikh Omar's defense team said, too). Finally, Clinton bombed Iraqi intelligence HQ just two days after the Day of Terror plot was publicly busted, and the plot to assassinate Bush in Kuwait provided his public rationale.
Next, 1995-1996. We all know about Terry Nichols's visit to Cebu in late 1994, and you'd also know about Jayna Davis's work connecting Timothy McVeigh to Iraqi soldiers resettled in Oklahoma City. And as I posted previously, according to Bodansky, the "Islamic Change Movement" claimed responsibility for Riyadh, Dhahran, and Flight 800, and promised a fourth event soon (I'll get back to the Iranian connection in a moment); but Islamists are not known for celebrating Baathist holidays like July 17, which might lead one to suspect that they were just an Iraqi front.
So there in brief is the argument that everything mentioned by Clarke can be tied to Iraq. Now, on to some specifics. So far I have not found any detailed description of how and why Eric Rudolph bombed the Atlanta Olympics, so I can't say whether there's room for "others unknown" (e.g. a Mukhabarat handler for the Iraqi Olympic Team) to have given him a hand.
However, we do have a detailed indictment for the Khobar Towers bombing, issued on the eve of the fifth anniversary in June 2001. It does state, emphatically and in great detail, that it was carried out by Saudi Hezbollah, under the direction and with the assistance of Iranian military/intelligence personnel.
Two years later, when the "Feith memo" was leaked, Daniel Benjamin wrote: "... some of the material presented in the article insinuates that Iraq staged the Khobar Towers bombing, when two administrations have laid the blame at Iran's door."
What's he talking about? Here is Hayes's article, "Case Closed". Benjamin must be referring to items 9 and 10 from the memo, which appear to derive from a single source. The source says bin Laden went to Qatar in January 1996 (to meet with KSM?), and discussed the movement of explosives into Saudi Arabia for use against US targets, including one in Dhahran (location of Khobar Towers). The source also says that the head of the IIS visited bin Laden in Sudan in July 1996, "a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing", to discuss assistance in bomb-making, and observes that the Khobar Towers bombing came on the third anniversary of Clinton's bombing of the IIS headquarters.
Finally, this year the 9/11 Commission reported that Al Qaeda played an unknown role in the Khobar Towers bombing. I have no idea what its source was, but perhaps it was the one in the memo.
So where does that leave the plot described in the June 2001 Khobar Towers indictment? I'm not sure. Neither Iran nor Saudi Arabia was particularly happy with the indictment.
Now, on to the African embassy bombings. I can name someone who blamed Iraq: it is, surprise surprise, Laurie Mylroie, who says here (on a page hosted at AEI.org!) that it was Iraq working through Al Qaeda. On August 5, Saddam unilaterally suspended weapons inspections; on August 7, the bombs went off; on August 8, "victory day", gave this speech on the victory of "power" over brute force. He's talking about Iran, but he could equally be talking about the USA.
Just as with Khobar Towers, there is an alternative view that Iran was the sponsor of the embassy bombings; Bodansky spends a chapter of "Bin Laden" making that case.
An argument on the basis of dates alone would indeed be suspect. However, what we know (or what we're told) about the details of the various bombing conspiracies genuinely appears to leave room for Iraqi sponsorship, and in that context the timing of these attacks certainly adds to the case against Iraq.
Hmmm.
Perhaps I'm naive but I'm pretty sanguine about Iran. If, and this is perhaps a stretch here, Iraq can fulfill the early hopes for it to become a strong Democracy then the fate of Iran is sealed.
1. The Tomb of Ali is in Iraq.
2. The Tomb of Ali is the holy site for all Shia'a.
3. All Shia'a are supposed to go on pilgramage to the Tomb at least once in their lifetime.
This means that just about every single Iranian will get to experience a full-blown Democracy first hand. They won't be seeing it on TV, they will be living it.
And after that, they can go home to the constraints of a lousy economy and the rule of lazy ruthless corrupt mullahs.
Hmmmm.
mitch:
I'm not disputing that there is evidence here (though hopefully this'll help you to understand how I reached my own conclusions on this stuff), but it is equally possible to tie the majority of these attacks back to Iran or Saudi Arabia. This is what I mean regarding the fact that there is often ambiguous data that can be interpretted multiple ways. There are still a fair number of people within the CIA, for example, who regard Lockerbie as the result of Syrian or Iranian terrorism rather than Libyan. I would also be extremely hesitant with your thesis that Clinton or members of his administration accepted Mylroie's thesis hook, line, and sinker with respect to Ramzi Yousef and his contemporaries.
I'm aware of the claim made by both Mylroie and the Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman defense team with respect to the "day of terror" plot and to put it another way ... the Bureau isn't clever enough to hatch a plan like this. They didn't even know enough translate the al-Qaeda training manual that they found with one of Abdul Rahman's followers for years on end. In addition, the sheikh was a paid asset of VEVAK and had been such ever since the 1980s when Iran supported Gamaa al-Islamiyyah's bid to destabilize the Egypt. Even if the sheikh had been tied to Iraq, 2 days after him being busted wouldn't have been enough time for the Bureau to make that kind of a conclusion, ignoring the fact that Clinton's bombing of the Mukhabarat HQ was hardly what I would term a show of strength so much as an ineffectual response to a very serious plot to assassinate a former US head of state.
I would note that Islamists do celebrate Iraqi holidays like July 17 and if you want specific examples, I'll give you 2 who were unquestionably al-Qaeda: Imad Yarkas (Abu Dahdah) and Yousef Galan. They both celebrated a number of Iraqi holidays despite their ethnicities and if you look into the voluminous Spanish court documents on the subject I think you'll find that Galan showed up at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid for a number of parties under his al-Qaeda nom de guerre.
Believe me, if the current administration could have tied Iraq back to the Khobar Towers bombing, they almost certainly would have. It was carried out by Iran and al-Qaeda and a number of very high-ranking Iranian officials were involved. Bin Laden also left Sudan prior to July 1996 and while we cannot account for his exact location during the month in question, this does present a problem if one is to believe that he was visited by an Iraqi delegation during this period. As far as al-Qaeda's role in the Khobar Towers bombing, I believe I wrote up something regarding that back during my lengthy critique of the 9/11 report.
As you can probably imagine, I tend to be of the opinion that Iran rather than Iraq was behind the embassy bombings for one reason: the US has proof that members of the Iranian military-intelligence apparatus had foreknowledge from al-Qaeda that something bad was going to happen during the period in question and I can't go any further than this.
Like I said, in many cases the evidence with regard to this stuff is rather ambiguous and there certainly is room for Iraqi as well as Iranian involvement in every attack you've just described and I'd be very interested as to whether or not there's any way these two theories can be harmonized, in truth. However, I would argue that to assert that the Clinton administration accepted Mylroie's theses at face value ... does not square with the evidence at hand, which is a major problem with the whole "secret war" thesis.
The source also says that the head of the IIS visited bin Laden in Sudan in July 1996, "a few weeks after the Khobar Towers bombing", to discuss assistance in bomb-making, and observes that the Khobar Towers bombing came on the third anniversary of Clinton's bombing of the IIS headquarters.
you know, one wonders if IIS didn't want help from Al Qaeda on bomb making rather than the other way around, given that Khobar was pretty much a smashing success on that score. Perhaps they wanted some info on Hizb'allah techniques so that they could recognize them.
What does Clare advance as his theory on TWA 800? Interesting that he includes it in a list of terrorist events given the final conclusion that it wasn't one.
I try to stay away from conspiracy theories, but I have long been of the opinion that TWA 800 was brought down by a terrorist bomb on board. Just not buying that the traces of RDX found were from 5 years prior during the Gulf War, and surviving a dunking in the sea.
My theory was Algerian terrorists targeting the French - not the US. IIRC, there were bombings at French rail stations conducted by the Algerians that same week.
blaster: He says it was an accident - that's why he has "terrorist" in quotes; the list was also meant to encompass events that looked like terrorism at first but proved not to be.
I read somewhere (twa800.com?) that there was another TWA flight going to Israel around that time, the speculation being that "they" got the wrong flight. That theory would appear to imply that it was a missile rather than a bomb - it would be a lot easier to shoot down the wrong plane than to plant a bomb on the wrong plane.
Even the moderate wing of the Saudi dynasty has supported Wahhabism and continues to do so, which is one of the reasons why the royal family continues to. The moment this arrangement changes, I assure you, the princes will be the first ones to know.
OK. So the situation is worse than I had thought.
Crown Prince Abdullah is, to be quite honest, little more than a passing acquaintance of the president. Prince Bandar is another matter altogether and is a subject of great frustration for myself and others like me who wish to have Wahhabi influence extricated from our government.
Bandar is the one I had in mind. And I share your concerns.
Saudis, like any other group of people, think a great many things about a great many issues and the United States is no exception to this. The religious leadership, however, very much does wish us ill, as do the various magnates who support them and the estimated several thousand to tens of thousands of Saudi al-Qaeda members and sympathizers. I doubt that everyone in Germany wanted the Jews dead either, but there were unfortunately enough. The same is true of the Magic Kingdom.
Understood. But there are two questions I'd like to find answers to: 1) is our President a traitor or is he acting in good faith? 2) is Saudi Arabia still strategically useful to us as an ally in the region or should they be thrown under a bus?
I doubt that the President is acting in bad faith but the accusation is made constantly, so it doesn't hurt to consider it. Because I believe the President is an honest man and is acting in good faith, I feel that there must be some good reason why the Administration continues to play games with the house of Saud. My best-guess had been that at least some support of the Wahhabi sect was only given begrudgingly and that there were some in the Saudi regime who would welcome help in freeing themselves from the bondage. But the more I hear, the less likely that seems.