Joker's Wild
by Nyier Abdou
Did the US exploit fears about Al-Qa'eda to rally the nation around an invasion of Iraq? Nyier Abdou revisits one of the key building blocks of the Bush administration's case for war.
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In Baghdad, I rode with US soldiers from the Third Infantry Division as they conducted security patrols throughout the city. Most soldiers were more interested in hearing an outsider's view of the war than they were in talking about the war itself - or the occupation they were now a part of. But on the subject of the threat Iraq had posed to the US, one soldier angrily dismissed anti-war sentiment as nonsensical dissidence. "I don't want to be here either," he growled, his eyes fixed on the road as he manoeuvred our humvee through traffic-clogged streets.
He was no fan of reporters and he didn't have the patience for philosophising about the larger geopolitical significance of the US's concept of a "preemptive" strike. A native New Yorker, he pounded his chest with one fist as he invoked the memory of 11 September. "Those were my Twin Towers," he said.
Ahead of the war in Iraq, many Americans saw war in Iraq as part of the "war on terrorism", intrinsically linking Iraq with the tragic events of 11 September. Half of the 1,200 Americans questioned in a national Knight Ridder poll taken on 3- 6 January maintained that some of the 11 September hijackers were Iraqis. However, as has been clear since shortly after the attacks, none of the hijackers were from Iraq.
In his State of the Union Address on 28 January, US President George W Bush declared that "evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of Al-Qa'eda". A Fox News poll conducted in the days following the speech found that 81 per cent of the 900 registered voters polled "believe Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has ties to the terrorist group Al- Qa'eda". Only six per cent said no. The remaining 13 per cent were "not sure".
In his address to the UN Security Council on 5 February, US Secretary of State Colin Powell claimed one alleged Al-Qa'eda operative, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was "operating freely" in Baghdad. Later that month, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that Iraq has offered training in bomb-making and chemical weapons to "Al-Qa'eda associates".
Ilan Berman, vice president for policy at the conservative Washington-based think tank the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) and a terrorism and Middle East expert, stresses that while the Bush administration has consistently maintained that Saddam Hussein supported terrorism, "It has stopped short of asserting that Iraq was directly complicit in the 11 September attacks."
Where the Bush administration left off, however, the American public kept going. In a February CNN-Time poll, 72 per cent of those polled believed it was either "very" or "somewhat" likely Saddam Hussein was "personally involved in the September 11 attacks".
This implication worked in the favour of administration hawks seeking to crank up the war machine. Derek Mitchell, founder of the Washington-based Centre for Cooperative Research (CCR) and an analyst who has been documenting events related to the Bush administration's Iraq policy since late 2001, insists that the importance of the link drawn between Hussein and Al-Qa'eda "cannot be understated".
The Al-Qa'eda connection, says Mitchell, "was an essential component of the hawks' official justification for war". Making the link allowed the administration to stave off arguments by critics that even if Saddam Hussein had maintained his programme to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD), he was extremely unlikely to use WMD against the US or its allies.
"The Bush administration actively linked the two issues - WMD and links to Al-Qa'eda - into the argument about the threat posed by Iraq," agrees Marc Lynch, an assistant professor of political science at Williams College and a specialist in international security and Middle East politics. "I don't think that the WMD argument alone would have been enough to win popular support for the war against Iraq. They needed to portray the Iraq war as part of the wider war on terror - and so they did."
US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld called the evidence that Iraq cooperated with Al- Qa'eda "bulletproof", but it seems that it would be in the administration's interest to make that information public. Ahmad Lutfi, a Middle East and terrorism expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, insists that there has been no sufficient evidence shown to prove a link between Baghdad and Al-Qa'eda. "Any such claims lack material backing, and to date we have not seen any," he said. "Had there been any, not just bulletproof, we would have seen it by now," he added. "The bodies of [Saddam Hussein's sons] Uday and Qusay were on display within hours - that is the level of proof that is both compelling and silencing to critics."
One argument used against the Iraq-Al-Qa'eda connection is that Al-Qa'eda's strict religious ideology is at odds with the secularism of Hussein's Ba'ath Party. This point was underscored in a 21 July article in the New York Times by former National Security Council staffers Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon and backed by IISS's Lutfi, who worked with Benjamin and Simon on their book The Age of Sacred Terror. But even those who sceptically question Baghdad's alleged support of Al-Qa'eda concede that under extreme duress, the two sides could potentially collaborate under the age-old reasoning that "my enemy's enemy is my friend".
"History is full of examples where the convergence of strategic interests led groups with opposing ideologies to work jointly," says Iraq expert Derek Mitchell. But he adds that in hindsight, it seems "very improbable that Al-Qa'eda had any intention of working with Saddam's regime".
"It would be impossible to definitively rule out the possibility, however unlikely," admits security expert Marc Lynch. He insists, however, that the "real question" that needed to be considered when establishing the US's crucial policy on Iraq was how likely a partnership actually was, in comparison to other possible threats. "I have not seen any evidence that this actually happened, or that this particular alliance of convenience was particularly likely."
One of the most contentious uses of the "war on terrorism" in making the case for war was the administration's hypothetical argument that Iraq could provide biological or chemical weapons to a terrorist group at any given moment. In the context of the "preemptive" strike, this drastically widens the basis on which to launch a war. The strategy has its critics and its supporters, but there is no question that it places a heavy burden of proof on the US to show that its allegations are well founded - something many analysts say was not the case with the Al-Qa'eda link.
The larger strategic implications of the US's shift in security strategy are yet to be seen. Libya, Iran and Syria, to name a few "rogue states" considered to be hostile to US interests, have all been cited by the US as sponsoring terrorism and developing chemical and biological weapons. But Berman says this fact alone does not mean that future military action against these countries is "guaranteed - or even likely". Instead of a "one size fits all" mentality, says Berman, Washington is "flexibly employing a range of mechanisms", from "preemptive military action" (in the case of Iraq), to "containment" (as is the case with Iran), to "political pressure" of the kind focussed on Syria.
Still, following 11 September, the "war on terrorism" was understood to mean an aggressive effort to dismantle international terrorist organisations - not states. With the war in Iraq, CCR's Mitchell argues that the US "has essentially broken loose from the international laws that previously guided international conflicts between state powers".
Recent attacks against US soldiers in Iraq were claimed by the previously unknown "Armed Islamic Movement for Al-Qa'eda, the Falluja Branch". Whether this group is connected to Al-Qa'eda, or simply sympathetic, is not known, but it could be used by the administration to lend credence to claims of Al-Qa'eda activity in Iraq. Even so, analysts note that showing Al-Qa'eda to be active in Iraq now does nothing to prove a relationship prior to the war. "It would be more accurate, perhaps, to say that the American occupation of Iraq has presented Islamists with an opportunity," surmises Lynch. "It is even possible that Iraq could develop, in the next few years, into something comparable to Afghanistan in the 1980s - a training ground for a new generation of Islamist radicals and a rallying point for Islamist ideologues."
But terrorism expert Ahmad Lufti finds this argument exasperating, dismissing anti-American resistance as "a group of leftover elements who remain in denial about Saddam's rule being no more". He notes that if Al-Qa'eda were operating in Iraq, its leadership would have been at pains to "make sure the whole world knew about it by now".
Al-Qa'eda has become the administration's wild card - the clincher when other attempts at swaying public opinion falter. But Lufti cautions against further aggrandising the perceived omnipresence of Bin Laden. "How much more do we need to increase the size of the US-created legend called Al-Qa'eda?" he asks. "Let's see it for what it really is for a change."
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– Nyier H Abdou
Nyier H Abdou
Al-Ahram Weekly
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E-mail: Nyier H Abdou
This article was first run on Al-Ahram Weekly
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