An Eyewitness to Terror

The old “Saddam and al-Qaeda weren’t friends” canard get more canard-y by the day.

WASHINGTON — A deputy prime minister of Iraq yesterday offered a sharp contradiction of the conventional wisdom here that Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Al Qaeda had no connection before the 2003 war, flatly contradicting a recent report from the Senate’s intelligence committee.

In a speech in which he challenged the belief of war critics that Iraqis’ lives are now worse than under Saddam Hussein, Barham Salih said, “The alliance between the Baathists and jihadists which sustains Al Qaeda in Iraq is not new, contrary to what you may have been told.” He went on to say, “I know this at first hand. Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam’s regime.”

A Kurdish politician who took his high school exams from inside a Baathist prison, Mr. Salih said he was the target of the alliance between jihadists, Baathists, and Al Qaeda in 2001, when a group known as Ansar al-Islam tried to assassinate him. In 2002, envoys of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two Kurdish parties sharing sovereignty over northern Iraq between the two Iraq wars, presented the CIA with evidence that the organization that tried to kill Mr. Salih had been in part funded and directed by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard.

This is not a real revelation. We’ve known here that Hussein was funding Ansar al-Islam for some time. We couldn’t prove it in a court of law, which is one of the main reasons folks like me think it’s a supremely foolish idea to treat terrorism as a crime subject to the courts. Nevertheless, men like Salih were fighting against Hussein’s proxy in northern Iraq even while folks like Colin Powell were telling us everything was hunky-dory.

I expect that Democrats will come forward and say we shouldn’t give much credence to Salih, since he’s obviously just one man and we have the vaunted US intelligence community saying that Ansar al-Islam probably wasn’t affiliated all that closely with al-Qaeda. This ignores the real issue, which involves clearly identifying the lines of force that existed between the old Iraqi regime and the terrorists which operated within the country so that we can help the Iraqis sever them once and for all. Saleh’s statements are important because they represent what the Kurds were dealing with on the ground, for well over a decade, instead of some analysis done by someone in a Langley office (and let’s not forget that in the past 30 years, the CIA has been horribly wrong far more often than it’s been even a little bit right).

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Category: Fighting the Islamists