Update: For the new visitors coming from Instapundit and Powerline thank you. My blog was started in reaction to 9/11 and I am focused on the war on terror. I have a page where I put up the best of the links here.
Saddam had no collaborative links to Al Queda..ok explain these items!
In an interview prior to the 1990 Iraq invasion of Kuwait, Saddam warned Ambassador Glaspie that should the United States decide to pressure Iraq in order to stop the invasion he would use individual Arabs to strike back.
We know that you can harm us although we do not threaten you. But we too can harm you. Everyone can cause harm according to their ability and their size. We cannot come all the way to you in the United States, but individual Arabs may reach you.” So we have a Dictator threatening to send individual Arabs to harm us and this isn’t a smoking gun?
This threats simplicity leaves much unsaid but assumed by anyone not afflicted with the sort of institutional bias apparently so common in our bureaucracies. On one level, he is admitting a truth that seems to elude most of the liberal press and those in our bureaucracies who have such a institutional bias towards the idea that Al Queda is a stateless terror outfit. When faced with superior force one does not depend on ones inferior forces to strike against your enemy’s strength but instead use unconventional forces to strike against the enemies will to fight and not coincidently our tremendous weakness, by attacking our cities and citizens. This is the meaning of Saddams threat.
On another level, he specifically threatens to send his unconventional forces to the US to strike at us here. Odd, no one considers this a smoking gun? This lunatic stands up in an interview with the American Ambassador and says individual Arabs can reach us and that is not a smoking gun? What will it take, him standing on top of a smoking pile of rubble in one of our cites claiming responsibility?
Now why would he want to use terrorists instead of rolling his T-72s onto ships and invading the United States? Several reasons besides the ridiculousness of my absurd suggestion exaggerated to make a point. One must understand that even if he had sufficient forces to attack us by invasion he might still choose to use terrorism, the Soviets who certainly had sufficient forces believed that using terrorists as surrogates was an effective means of achieving State goals. But why?
Because in a democracy the weakest link in the will to fight wars is the civilian population as the North Vietnamese demonstrated so ably in South East Asia, to defeat the United States one must avoid fights with the strongest military the world has seen and concentrate on the most comfortable populace the world has seen. But that still doesn’t explain why the unique qualities of terrorists might be actually more effective than a large army.
In using a terrorist the obvious advantage is, if it is done correctly and carefully, there is no trail back to the state, which is obviously good if that State does not want to face the might of the superior states forces, witness the kerfluffle in the press now about the links between Al Queda and Saddam.
But the anonymity not only saves ones hide from annihilation from superior forces, it also acts as a force multiplier for your unconventional forces in the form of terrorists. See if you invade with your tanks the populace while at first being stunned will immediately have an enemy, and that enemy will have a face in the form of a country. We may despair for a moment but with a face to the enemy we will rise in righteous might and destroy that State just as we have destroyed others. With a faceless terrorist ideally not identified with a country the task of striking back will seem hopeless, despair will set in quickly and some means of coming to terms with the enemy will be sought.
That the enemy has no terms except outright surrender does not matter since we will be eaten in small bites in the slow retreat from our position in the world. The obvious short term goal of the enemy is our retreat from the Middle East, for this goal using faceless Arab terrorists makes the point that we must retreat from the Middle East to appease them while still not putting a State face to the terrorists which acts as a force multiplier for any acts they can commit in our country.
The sheer balls of the man is astounding or perhaps he just had us pegged since no one ever thought to connect him to any events that occurred after we threw him out of Kuwait.
The first of those events was the World Trade Tower Bombing in February 1993. Constructing what turned out to be the largest truck bomb ever constructed to that point, several individual Arabs attempted to collapse one Tower into the other in an attack that saw estimates run as high as 250,000 dead had the plan worked.
Some have attempted to portray this attack as not coming close to achieving its goal, without mentioning that the crater destroyed six stories of concrete parking garage. The two terrorists most responsible for the attack were ringers that came in to help a band of incompetents who were destined to take the fall. Ramsey Yousef AKA “The Iraqis” escaped immediately but Abdul Yasin was indeed questioned by the FBI who then in what would be one of the worst errors in FBI history allowed him to leave the country.
Considering the attitude of the Clinton Administration Justice department who could blame them? Here we had a terror attack that could have conceivably murdered 250,000 people and for a bit the Clinton Administration tried to say it was some sort of accident. Then when faced with the facts that it was not an accident they turned what was an act of war into a Police matter. Suffice to say that Abdul Yasin under today’s rules would be talking to Army Interrogators at Gitmo.
Instead under Clinton’s desire to treat this act of war as a Police matter, Abdul Yasin, because the FBI lacked the evidence at this point to hold him, was released, naturally he immediately fled to Iraq where he was put up and taken care of by the Iraqis government. Abdul Yasin was one of two experts who constructed a truck bomb that nearly killed 250,000 people, 83 times more than were to die 8 years later, and he was let go because of lack of evidence. Let that sink in for a moment then you decide whether treating terrorist acts as police matters is such a great idea.
Then we have the attempted assassination of a Former US President. Here is where the left in this country go absolutely loopy. They actually believe that attempting to murder a former President is no big thing and that furthermore because it happened so long ago that it should be forgotten. As if there is a statue of limitations on the attempted Assassination of one of our Former Presidents and even more importantly that this isn’t some of the best available evidence of exactly how far Saddam will go and further what sort of tactics he will consider. We have a Dictator who not only is crazy enough to attempt to murder a Former US President, but he is willing to murder up to several hundred people to accomplish this goal. Further that this crazed son of a gun is willing to use classic terrorist methods to accomplish his goal. But he isn’t a terrorist?
The Bomb that was to be used was to be detonated while Former President Bush attended a parade in a crowd of Kuwaiti well wishers arranged along the route with many members of his family present. This was an another act of war. Clinton’s response was to bomb the Iraqis intelligence headquarters the evidence was irrefutable that the bomb was a Iraqis bomb and the punishment meted out by Clinton was a few cruise missiles destroying an empty building.
Much is made of the mutual distrust of Saddam and Bin Laden for each other, never mentioning that they were both Sunni Muslims. Yes it is true that Saddam probably wasn’t as pious as Bin Laden but there is also evidence that he was changing. Furthermore both of them had shown a willingness to ally themselves with the hated Shiite Muslims in Iran a divide that shouldn’t be overlooked. Remember that the United States buried the hard feelings with the Soviet Union till the war with the Nazis was won. We are certainly much more formidable of an enemy to the Saddams and Bin Ladens of the world than the Nazis were to us. They certainly are even weaker even collectively compared to us and what our position was in relation to Germany in WW2, so they have even more, much more reason to ally to each other in order to kill us. This is so obvious I don’t know why it is still being argued.
Finally both of them helped the other in exactly the areas where they were weakest. Saddam needed to strike at us to force us out of his way and for pure revenge without having a finger pointing at him and the Al Queda needed arms, training, weapons and money. From Saddam’s point of view striking at us using anonymous terrorists was even more effective aside from obvious advantage of not being blamed, since the US public if faced with repeated strikes from anonymous terrorists could be expected to lose heart much faster than the same strikes carried out by a Nation. The American public could take heart if they believed that destroying that nation would both stop the attacks and exact revenge, whereas if the attacks were successfully blamed on stateless terrorists the US Public would lose heart perhaps more quickly. But for his plan to work he absolutely had to do everything possible to avoid being linked credibly to the Terrorists, I wonder if he knew how much the Western Press and Democratic Party would help?
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