Saddam's Terrorist Connections

It's a false assumption that the media has made for several years, unchallenged by the Bush Administration: that Saddam Hussein's Iraq had no terrorist connections.

In another must read article in the Weekly Standard, Stephen Hayes summarizes an exhaustive Pentagon report released last week about what should be headline news related to Saddam Hussein's terrorist connections. The report was based on some 600,000 documents captured in post-war Iraq and contains over 1,600 pages of "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism."

Throughout the early and mid-1990s, Saddam Hussein actively supported an influential terrorist group headed by the man who is now al Qaeda's second-in-command, according to an exhaustive study issued last week by the Pentagon. "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.

Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam's use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime."

For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.

In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.

That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.

"Captured documents reveal that the regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda--as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision."

And it goes on and on. So with all this evidence, why isn't the story finally getting straightened out? As Hayes explains:

What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself--can convince them to reexamine their mistaken assumptions.

It's a terrible shame that Bush's enemies can dictate these untruths without rebuttal and that is Bush's real failure. Bush believes that the history books will eventually get it right, but I doubt it if he doesn't bother to correct the record himself.