Phase II smackback

A few noted Saddam/Iraq experts are now taking pen to paper, or rather fingers to keyboards, after having fully digested the recent Phase II report issued by the Senate regarding Iraq war intelligence failures.

One thing they seem to agree upon--and it stood out like a sore thumb anyway--was a certain willingness to take at face value the testimonies of former regime members, including Saddam himself, on a variety of questions.

Said Stephen Hayes:

On what basis do the authors claim that Saddam Hussein was "resistant" to cooperation with Islamists? The finding is sourced to "postwar detainee debriefs--including debriefs of Saddam Hussein and Tariq Aziz." Well then, that settles it.

In another Weekly Standard feature Christopher Hitchens tackled the Nigerian yellowcake story and exposes another hard-to-believe declaration:

Why send Iraq's only fully accredited European ambassador such a long way on such a mission? And what were Saddam Hussein and the Nigerien president supposed to discuss if such a visit were to come off? The price of goats?

Hitchens handily points out the nuclear background of Iraq's emmissary to Niger, Mr. Zahawie, and also reminds us that UNSCOM chief weapons inspector Rolf Ekeus was offered million dollar bribes from Iraq to look the other way regards his inspections. Why would Aziz do this if, as the report says, Iraq had destroyed most of its WMD stocks by 1991?

Hayes also points out another interesting ommission:

There is no mention in the report of Abdul Rahman Yasin, an Iraqi who admitted mixing the chemicals for the bomb used in the 1993 World Trade Center attack, cited in the July 2004 Senate report as an al Qaeda operation.

Ironically Yasin was also ommitted from the recent ABC series "Road to 9/11" (yet the left says it was biased against the Clinton administration). It's as if he no longer exists.

Thomas Jocelyn recently wrote about the merger between AQ and the Algerian terrorist outfit GSPC and reminded us of the links between the Saddam and GSPC. The original ISG report did not make the link, but did admit that other foreign nationals were trained at Salmon Pak. The Senate report is making the distinction between al Qaeda and other foreign nationals, lightly suggesting the latter were somehow insignificant.

But by far the most interesting part of the report was the exploits of Faruq Hijazi and his visit to meet UBL in Sudan during January 1996. Keep in mind the CIA tried to foment a coup in Iraq in 1996, which was being ramped up that very same January.

The report doesn't provide a concrete opinion as to why bin Laden was demanding an office in Baghdad and certain weapons or what Saddam might have asked for. Certainly if bin Laden was asking for things, so was Saddam. That's how things are done. Such a lack of reasonable alternative explanations (or any for that matter) tends to discredit the report's value.

For instance, leaving unchallenged Saddam's statement that the United States was 'not his enemy' and that 'he just opposed our policies' is outright laughable.

The report was probably meant more for political cover to democrats who voted for the war than to getting at the truth. It was known the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and State Department were at odds with the CIA over most of the intelligence on Iraq, but in a post 9/11 mindset the president chose the worst case assessment.

It could well turn out that almost everything UNSCOM, UNMOVIC, and the Clinton administration told us, later acted on by the Bush administration, was flat wrong. But it could also be true that the IIS cleaned out all the incriminating evidence before US investigators reached it, and that Iraq had plans to regenerate WMD programs as soon as sanctions were dropped.

Let's hope that historians will one day get a bearing on the nature of Iraq's threat, or whether American politicians simply manipulated Saddam into a political scarecrow. Who knows, history may also record something a little more sinister.. Right now it's still impossible to say.

SADDAM THE MAGNIFICENT 9/17/06

The Senate could have saved a lot of trouble by just substituting Saddam's open letter of July 7 instead of their Phase II report. After all,

Saddam Hussein, ladies and gentlemen, is an honorable patriot and an honest man.

After 9/11 Saddam sent three similar letters to America explaining why he thought we were hit (rather than offering an apology). They're not easy to find in the search engines, but they exist on message boards, such as here. Saddam also used similar disinformation practices during the Gulf War. It's clear he's still fighting the Mother of all Battles, and that perhaps the only way to defeat America was to draw us into a 'quagmire' in Iraq, thus forcing our retreat and, well here, let's let him explain it:

That is because when America was expelled from Viet Nam it did not lose its standing, or we might say it only lost a small part of its standing. But when it is expelled and routed from Iraq, which has no great power to support it directly, it will lose the fundamental basis of its standing.

He knew he couldn't defeat us on the battlefield, so how then? Perhaps by drawing us into an Iraqi quagmire and forcing our withdrawal he felt he would emerge as a cause celebre for defeating American imperialism?

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, BABY 9/18/06

The first letter was mailed five years ago today. This was not covered in the Senate report, but apparently addressed by other branches of the government.