It's not my intention to get involved in a lengthy debate here on pre-war Iraqi ties to al-Qaeda, especially given that my view of such ties is widely known by long-time readers of this blog. I do, however, want to my best to "debunk" a meme that I've seen sprouting up on a number of blogs of late. If you want to believe or argue that there were no Iraqi ties al-Qaeda prior to the US invasion, that's fine by me, disagree with it though I may. At the same time, however, I hope you'll agree that it befits all parties concerned to base our respective cases on the best possible evidence, right?
What are you talking about?
To put it quite simply, I'm talking about invoking this map released by the State Department in November 2001 as though it were gospel truth on the issue of Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda. This has been done on several major blogs that I've seen and has been cited by people who, to put it quite frank, I know are smarter than this, and thus a meme has been created that the State Department itself could not find any al-Qaeda interaction with regard to Iraq as of November 2001, ergo Bush's claims of pre-war ties between Iraq and al-Qaeda must be bogus.
There are a couple of different ways to reply to this, such as noting that the Bush administration wasn't the first to publicly link Iraq and al-Qaeda - the Clinton administration was in their original 1998 indictment. There is also the point to be made that Ansar al-Islam was formed inside Iraq in September 2001 - two months prior to the date this little chart was released, and that bin Laden had backed its predecessor Jund al-Islam and even earlier Kurdish Islamist groups such as the Second Souran Unit at least as far back as 1997, so Iraq should be on the list regardless of whether or not Saddam Hussein ever interacted with al-Qaeda.
But let us not dwell on the details.
To be quite frank, what we are dealing with here is a deeply flawed product and one that the State Department should be ashamed of itself to release. For example, I must have missed Kosovo's declaration of independence ...
A deeply flawed document ...
Above the map reads "Countries Where al Qaeda Has Operated" (emphasis mine), so the implication is that we are dealing with past, present, and future. So what's missing here?
Quite a bit, I'm afraid:
- Most noticeable and rather concerning is the absence of Indonesia on this list, even though JI has been operating there openly ever since the fall of Suharto in 1998 and clandestinely as far back as the 1980s. You don't have to be in government to recognize that - the information was available to any number of credible analysts beforehand.
- Canada was used by Ahmed Ressam and his cell as a logistics point from which to plan their Millennium Plot attack on the United States in 1999. This is a simple matter of accessing the court documents from Ressam's trial and seeing that it was the most recent attempt by al-Qaeda to attack the US homeland prior to 9/11, one might hope that this warranted some attention. Guess whoever did the chart felt otherwise ...
- Liberia and Burkina Faso also aren't on the list, despite the fact that al-Qaeda has been using the two nations as a hub for their diamond-buying operation ever since 1998.
- The US suspended the operations of its embassies in Congo, Guinea-Bissau, and the Ivory Coast (as well as in Somalia and Sudan) immediately following the 1998 embassy bombings on the grounds that al-Qaeda had a known presence in each nation and could be planning follow-up attacks. Surely the State Department was aware of this - so why aren't any of the 3 on the list?
- Georgia has had a major al-Qaeda hub in the Pankisi Gorge where the network and its allies in Basayev's Chechen Killer Korps could operately freely at least as far back as 1999 and International Islamic Relief Organization based there helped to finance Khattab's invasion of Dagestan.
- Al-Qaeda had a thriving Moroccan affiliate in the form of Salafi Jihad/Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group all through the 1990s, to the point where their pseudo-political wing was a major force to be reckoned with among the urban poor.
- Burma/Myanmar isn't on the list even though al-Qaeda has been assisting Islamist elements of the badly-persecuted Rohingya rebels against the government since at least 1990. I even saw a videotape while I was in Washington of Arab al-Qaeda instructors delivering lectures on jihad and terrorism to Rohingya recruits in Bangladesh. The place is also a known transfer point for JI.
I can go on.
All of these facts, incidentally, are not some esoteric pieces of information but can be gained fairly quickly through such things as Google and even much of the popular literature on the subject of al-Qaeda that has sprung up since 9/11.
So what can we then conclude?
Whether or not there was collusion between the Iraqi government and Saddam Hussein, this chart neither proves nor disproves anything because what we're dealing with here is a very flawed piece of analysis. Now this raises some questions about how much research the people at the State Department put into this little presentation, though under the circumstances I'm prepared to cut them some slack on this with a couple of exceptions, notably Canada and the fact that Australia is listed whereas Indonesia is not. Moreover, as I noted earlier, if one is really looking into where al-Qaeda was active, Iraq should have been listed circa November 2001 because al-Qaeda's long-standing activities in Iraqi Kurdistan ranging from the Second Souran Unit all the way up to Ansar al-Islam.
Please understand, I'm not trying to be snarky on this one, but if you want to make an argument against Iraqi collaboration with al-Qaeda, this really isn't a good place to start from.
Dan, I think you have a typo in the last section... Whether or not there was collusion between the Iraqi government and Saddam Hussein, this chart... ?!?!
Feel free to delete this comment.
Non-sequitor:
The real question, which both the hawks and doves generally ignore (for good reason, since it requires to think), is whether there were any meaningful links. I have yet to see anything beyond a furtive tip-toeing between the two parties, and this over such a long period of time as to indicate that both parties had a difficult, if not impossible, task before if they were to create any sort of meaningful alliance.
"Ansar al-Islam was formed inside Iraq"
Or, to be more precise, inside the US-controlled no-fly zone in Iraq. The decision not to go after Al Ansar and Zarqawi before the invasion is arguably the greatest scandal of the Iraq war.
In the light of the toleration of Al Ansar, Saddam would have a better case for claiming US ties to Al-Qaeda than vice versa.
Dan, is is possible that the State Department means something different by "operated" than you or I might?
I also note that indications of al Qaeda activities in South America are conspicuous by their absence on the map to which you linked. Evidence of long-standing al Qaeda operations in Paraguay is at least suggestive as is attested here, here, and here, for example.
Gotta disagree with you on this, John: The decision not to go after Al Ansar and Zarqawi before the invasion is arguably the greatest scandal of the Iraq war.
1. Until we were ready to invade in force, we were restricted to no-fly, air-to-air ops only. We did push that to include taking out air-control posts when we were attacked from the ground by Saddam's military, but anything more would have been seen as the initiation of the war. And you don't want to start the war until you are ready and can do so in force.
2. Ansar al Islam operated right on the border with Iran and close to the border with Turkey. Any significant action on the ground there would have constituted not only the start of the ground war but also a major diplomatic crisis with Turkey. Remember that we were still trying to get permission to bring the 4th Infantry Division in from the north through Turkey. If we could have done so, that would have been worth holding off against the Ansar camps for a while.
Of course, we ultimately failed to get Turkish permission, in part because of our negotiations with the various Kurdish groups. But those negotiations were critical, because we did not want to have some of the Kurds either shelter Ansar from us on ethnic grounds or open attacks on either Turkey or Iran. We needed to keep matters from spinning out of control -- that would have undercut our larger war plan significantly.
If we had launched premature ground action against the Ansar crews, they would simply have crossed to Iran, where we were not prepared to go (at least not openly, at that time).
That said, you will no doubt recall how quickly we had special ops forces and peshmerga there once we did move against Iraq. The help of the rest of the Kurds was an important reason we were able to take them down quickly ... and I would not be surprised to learn that some of those Kurds crossed the porous border into Iran to do so. If that happened, it was done in a disciplined and limited way, one payoff from our own discipline in holding off the tactical battle until we were ready to launch the strategic one.
For me, John Kerry, the Democrats, the so-called Anti-War folks simply have no credibility and are not serious. Every time they say there are NO al Qaeda-Iraq connections, I dump them down the memory hole. Every time, they say 'unilateralism', I turn off my ears. Every time, they say that the Iraq War is a distraction from the War on Terror, I think they need to be sent back to the Mother Ship. Every time, they say 'Bush Lied', they end up in my moonbat file inside the trash compactor.
After almost 3 years of this nonsense, they've dug themselves in so deep of a hole, they're going to have to get on the straight and narrow over a decent period of time before I'd ever consider voting for the Dems.
First, the Iraq critics claimed that the Bush Administration wanted to attack Iraq as soon as they got into office and immediately after 911.
Now, they point to a map released by the State Department in November 2001 that there were supposedly no ties between Iraq and Al Queda.
So the plotting Hawks missed a golden opportunity to push their Iraq agenda forward by not adding 4 letters on a map. Someone should get fired for not documenting the Bush/Cheney agenda properly. It must be Rumsfield's fault.
Give me a break,
SBD
Lucky for Jabba he's got those beans in his ears, he won't be affected by the rumor that we're telling him: Iraq is fubar. (Our liberal subversion of the MSM is succeeding.)
Gary Gunnels, you wrote: "The real question, which both the hawks and doves generally ignore... is whether there were any meaningful links [between al Qaeda and Iraq]. I have yet to see anything beyond a furtive tip-toeing between the two parties
This is an excellent point that sorely needed to be made at Winds of Change. In fact, the best analyst of open-source material on this subject is so furiously ignored here that he is virtually supressed. His name is Dan Darling, and I defy you to find a single reference to any of his posts at WoC, much less any links to the weblog that he devotes to the study of al Qaeda and the IIF.
Funny that the map doesn't include Spain, where Atta and the planners met before 9/11. It was also from Spain that came most of the money to finance the operation and if I'm not mistaken in November the 11 or so members of the financial cell had already been arrested.
You're right, Juan. IIRC, al-Qaeda's leader in Spain was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy there.
Robin, the Pentagon didn't think an attack was infeasible. Their plans were vetoed at the political level.
The problem with Turkey was not the need for help against Al Ansar, but the fact that the attack would have put them offside for the invasion of Iraq.
I think we're agreeing on that, John.
AMac,
Funny. :)
However, my statement referred to hawks and doves, not WoC.