The Trouble with Terrorism
posted by M. LeBlanc
As ogged so succinctly asserted in a post about the bombing in Times Square a couple of weeks ago:
Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent, in a piece responding to another piece by Jeffrey Goldberg at Slate, drew my attention to this report by the Joint Forces Command analyzing documents seized in Iraq, trying to make the case that Iraq, and Saddam in particular, was a supporter of terrorism.
I was intrigued by Goldberg's brazen declaration that the report proves exactly what it set out to:
So I went looking. I skimmed through most of the report, looking carefully at the section Ackerman cites (I would have looked at the sections Goldberg cited, but for the fact that he cited none) and performing a few searches. I found, first, that the report is not particularly well-done. The organization, if there can be called one, is designed to be obfuscatory rather than clear; it is organized around sections like "Managing Relationships [with terrorist groups]." If I was truly ambitious, I'd try to obtain an editable copy of the report and reorganize it in a sensible way, which would lay bare the report's utter failure to prove what it sets out to prove.
For instance, the report could be organized chronologically. This would demonstrate how laughably many of the documents cited come from 1993 and other times nearly a decade before we began to wage war in Iraq. It would demonstrate how few of them come from the period leading up to September 11 and even the period following it, exposing as hollow the report's true aim, which is to provide a post facto justification for the war, after the collapse of the WMD arguments, based on the idea that Saddam was somehow to blame for 9/11.
As yet another possible organizational structure, the report could be arranged by reference to links to various terrorist groups. This structure, however, would lay bare the fact that there would be no documents to put in an "Al Qaeda" section. There were no documents showing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, not even back in 1993 at what seemed to be the height of Iraq's symbolic-networking-with-terrorist-groups-a-thon. This structure would also lay bare the fact that the document providing the closest thing to a link to Al Qaeda is a 1993 memo stating that "In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt." How is this a link to Al Qaeda? Well, the fact that the Iraqi Intelligence Service met with some representative from a group which several years later merged with Al Qaeda, without any evidence that the Iraqis and the Islamic Jihad actually cooperated on anything, is apparently a link to Al Qaeda.
I'd like to pause in my analysis here to note that many of the Islamic Groups cited in the report are either small, disorganized, or pretty impotent at actually getting stuff done. Groups like the Islamic Jihad at the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the groups with which I am most familiar, wile away years at a time trying to figure out what their political program is or should be. State repression of these groups makes it difficult for them to cohere. And these are the types of groups whose possibly one-off meetings with members of Saddam's government in 1993 are being used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq as necessary to protect American lives. Worse, the extremely attenuated links to Al Qaeda, implied only by meetings at which no actions were resolved to be taken by a group who only later became an Al Qaeda affiliate, are used to justify the invasion as retribution for the 9/11 attacks.
But the really damning analysis comes from my search of the document for the words "bin Laden." His name appears on five pages of the forty-six page report, in service of the following points: 1) Both Bin Laden and Saddam had interests in Islamic movements in Somalia (p. 18-19). 2) Though Bin Laden and Saddam had similar practical goals (the removal of American influence from the Muslim world), they had different ideological goals, Bid Laden's being a worldwide Muslim regime, with sharia law applied to all, and Saddam's a pan-Arabist utopia, with Iraq at the center (p. 21). 3) The Iraqi Intelligence Service noted that the Army of Muhammad, in Bahrain, was affiliated with Bin Laden (p. 35). 4) Again, that Bin Laden and Saddam had similar short-term aims, but different long-term goals (p. 41). 5) Saddam "supported" the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was directly associated with Al Qaeda (p. 42) (see above paragraph for why statement is a false representation of what the evidence shows).
That's it. If there was any evidence whatsoever that there was ever a meeting, money exchanged, solidarity expressed, or any other kind of connection between the Iraqi government and Osama bin Laden, you can bet it would have been highlighted in the report in three different colors. The only conclusion that can be reached, then, is that there is no such evidence.
One final note about chronology—the fact that so many of the documents are from 1993 is significant because it shows that most of Iraq's contact with radical Islamic groups was in the wake of the first Gulf War. If you look on page 13, where there is a memo detailing Iraq's relationship with a host of different Islamic groups, it's clear that the research is done in service of a "who's with us?" investigation in case of another military engagement with the United States. The report itself acknowledges this, saying "one possible reason... Saddam kept contact with [those terrorist groups] was that he might use them in the future" (p. 23). However, reading over the documents, it's clearly the kind of symbolic contact (like, a periodic, "you and I, we're cool, right? Cool.") that doesn't even come close to constituting cooperation.
Finally, it's important to note that huge swaths of the report focus on Iraqi meetings with and intermittent financial support for Palestinian groups like Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Front. But these groups pose no direct threat to the United States; they pose a threat only to Israel. I doubt that the Joint Forces Command wants to paint the Iraq War as a proxy-war against Palestinian operatives, on Israel's behalf.
It's shoddy, shoddy work attempting to shore up support for the continued expense of American funds and American lives for a war that was wrong at every turn, and the report should be exposed for the miserable failure it is to do so. If we want to actually fight terrorism, which is a real and important and poorly-understood threat, we can not risk our safety by refusing to explore, recognize, and emphasize the difference between not just the stated objectives of terrorist groups, but their capacity, their funding, and their record of actually engaging in terrorist activity. This report does an almost laughably bad job of recognizing those difference, in service of a bitter "I-told-you-so" partisan aim.
Could it be more clear that an essential characteristic of "terrorism" as its defined in the US is that it be perpetrated by muslims? It literally isn't terrorism unless the guy who set off the bomb in Times Square is muslim.Read the post; it's short, and demonstrates the extent to which we've come to mean "Muslim dudes with bombs" when we say "terrorist." And once we exclude, unless we make that exclusion with great explanation and caveat, any non-muslim person from the elite hated, feared, and ass-kicking-deserving group of people we call terrorists, it's a precipitous slide into a world where we can't distinguish within that group at all.
Spencer Ackerman at The Washington Independent, in a piece responding to another piece by Jeffrey Goldberg at Slate, drew my attention to this report by the Joint Forces Command analyzing documents seized in Iraq, trying to make the case that Iraq, and Saddam in particular, was a supporter of terrorism.
I was intrigued by Goldberg's brazen declaration that the report proves exactly what it set out to:
I believed that Saddam was a supporter of terrorism. The report on Saddam's terrorist ties released last week by the Joint Forces Command confirms this (not that you would know it from the scant press coverage of the study). The study, citing captured Iraqi documents, indicates that Saddam's regime supported various jihadist groups, including Ayman al-Zawahiri's, and including Kurdish Islamist groups, about whom I have reported.and further intrigued by Ackerman's counter that no, in fact, it didn't:
What [the Kurdish operations] [were] obviously not [was] a collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. Rather, it was a campaign conducted by Saddam's own operatives. Goldberg says Saddam was "a supporter of terrorism." What he's hoping you're too half-awake to realize is that there's a difference between generic "terror" groups and Al Qaeda. The report, as I wrote in my piece, does not say, at all, contra to Goldberg's misleading implication, that Saddam collaborated with Ayman Zawahiri. It says that around 1993, a memo from one of Saddam's apparatchiks noted, "In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt."
So I went looking. I skimmed through most of the report, looking carefully at the section Ackerman cites (I would have looked at the sections Goldberg cited, but for the fact that he cited none) and performing a few searches. I found, first, that the report is not particularly well-done. The organization, if there can be called one, is designed to be obfuscatory rather than clear; it is organized around sections like "Managing Relationships [with terrorist groups]." If I was truly ambitious, I'd try to obtain an editable copy of the report and reorganize it in a sensible way, which would lay bare the report's utter failure to prove what it sets out to prove.
For instance, the report could be organized chronologically. This would demonstrate how laughably many of the documents cited come from 1993 and other times nearly a decade before we began to wage war in Iraq. It would demonstrate how few of them come from the period leading up to September 11 and even the period following it, exposing as hollow the report's true aim, which is to provide a post facto justification for the war, after the collapse of the WMD arguments, based on the idea that Saddam was somehow to blame for 9/11.
As yet another possible organizational structure, the report could be arranged by reference to links to various terrorist groups. This structure, however, would lay bare the fact that there would be no documents to put in an "Al Qaeda" section. There were no documents showing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda, not even back in 1993 at what seemed to be the height of Iraq's symbolic-networking-with-terrorist-groups-a-thon. This structure would also lay bare the fact that the document providing the closest thing to a link to Al Qaeda is a 1993 memo stating that "In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt." How is this a link to Al Qaeda? Well, the fact that the Iraqi Intelligence Service met with some representative from a group which several years later merged with Al Qaeda, without any evidence that the Iraqis and the Islamic Jihad actually cooperated on anything, is apparently a link to Al Qaeda.
I'd like to pause in my analysis here to note that many of the Islamic Groups cited in the report are either small, disorganized, or pretty impotent at actually getting stuff done. Groups like the Islamic Jihad at the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the groups with which I am most familiar, wile away years at a time trying to figure out what their political program is or should be. State repression of these groups makes it difficult for them to cohere. And these are the types of groups whose possibly one-off meetings with members of Saddam's government in 1993 are being used to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq as necessary to protect American lives. Worse, the extremely attenuated links to Al Qaeda, implied only by meetings at which no actions were resolved to be taken by a group who only later became an Al Qaeda affiliate, are used to justify the invasion as retribution for the 9/11 attacks.
But the really damning analysis comes from my search of the document for the words "bin Laden." His name appears on five pages of the forty-six page report, in service of the following points: 1) Both Bin Laden and Saddam had interests in Islamic movements in Somalia (p. 18-19). 2) Though Bin Laden and Saddam had similar practical goals (the removal of American influence from the Muslim world), they had different ideological goals, Bid Laden's being a worldwide Muslim regime, with sharia law applied to all, and Saddam's a pan-Arabist utopia, with Iraq at the center (p. 21). 3) The Iraqi Intelligence Service noted that the Army of Muhammad, in Bahrain, was affiliated with Bin Laden (p. 35). 4) Again, that Bin Laden and Saddam had similar short-term aims, but different long-term goals (p. 41). 5) Saddam "supported" the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which was directly associated with Al Qaeda (p. 42) (see above paragraph for why statement is a false representation of what the evidence shows).
That's it. If there was any evidence whatsoever that there was ever a meeting, money exchanged, solidarity expressed, or any other kind of connection between the Iraqi government and Osama bin Laden, you can bet it would have been highlighted in the report in three different colors. The only conclusion that can be reached, then, is that there is no such evidence.
One final note about chronology—the fact that so many of the documents are from 1993 is significant because it shows that most of Iraq's contact with radical Islamic groups was in the wake of the first Gulf War. If you look on page 13, where there is a memo detailing Iraq's relationship with a host of different Islamic groups, it's clear that the research is done in service of a "who's with us?" investigation in case of another military engagement with the United States. The report itself acknowledges this, saying "one possible reason... Saddam kept contact with [those terrorist groups] was that he might use them in the future" (p. 23). However, reading over the documents, it's clearly the kind of symbolic contact (like, a periodic, "you and I, we're cool, right? Cool.") that doesn't even come close to constituting cooperation.
Finally, it's important to note that huge swaths of the report focus on Iraqi meetings with and intermittent financial support for Palestinian groups like Hamas and the Palestinian Liberation Front. But these groups pose no direct threat to the United States; they pose a threat only to Israel. I doubt that the Joint Forces Command wants to paint the Iraq War as a proxy-war against Palestinian operatives, on Israel's behalf.
It's shoddy, shoddy work attempting to shore up support for the continued expense of American funds and American lives for a war that was wrong at every turn, and the report should be exposed for the miserable failure it is to do so. If we want to actually fight terrorism, which is a real and important and poorly-understood threat, we can not risk our safety by refusing to explore, recognize, and emphasize the difference between not just the stated objectives of terrorist groups, but their capacity, their funding, and their record of actually engaging in terrorist activity. This report does an almost laughably bad job of recognizing those difference, in service of a bitter "I-told-you-so" partisan aim.
Labels: Iraq, the war on terrah
Posted at 7:08 AM
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