Its been a central tenet of the MSM that the Baath Party is secular and wanted nothing to do with the Islamicists. I believe that for those who were honest in their arriving at that idea, that they mistook Saddam not loving Shia radicals for Saddam not loving any radicals. Here is a great article on American Thinker by Andrew G. Bostom author of the forthcoming book “The Legacy of Jihad”.
The illusion that the secular Baathist and radical islamicist would never work together has been shown to be a lie by any number of actions and evidence. That it persists merely attests to the desire of MSM to remove from the table the fact of Saddam had no problem using Islamic radicals as his secret soldiers. Both his declaration to Ambassador Glaspie of “We cannot come all the way to you in the United States, but individual Arabs may reach you” and his documented attempt to blow up Radio Free Europe attest to his desire to use radicals as his soldiers.
- The American Thinker: “Indeed, the very founder of the Baath Party, Michel Aflaq, was a Greek Orthodox Christian who converted to Islam, and declared emphatically, Islam is to Arabism what bones are to the flesh. (For an enlightening discussion of the Baathism is secularism canard, see this blog by Professor Frank Salameh , Monday May, 9, 2005, The Myth of Arab Nationalism). The Baathists just added another incendiary element to Iraqs long brewing cauldron of sectarian strife, which was so apparent during the British attempt at statecraft during the 1920s, through early 1930s. “
More evidence of the foolishness of believing that Baathists cannot work with Islamic radicals or the reverse that Islamic radicals cannot work with Baathists. This Washington Post article is proof that the MSM is still capable of well thought out articles from time to time. Take this quote from the article and try and imagine that there can be no collaboration between those supposedly disparate elements.
- Two weeks after the attacks in New York and at the Pentagon, the group felt bold enough to celebrate in public in Aleppo with a “festival,” as it was called, featuring video of hand-to-hand combat and training montages of guerrillas leaping from high walls.
Afterward, Abu Qaqaa was arrested by the Syrian authorities, but he was released within hours. By 2002 the anti-American festivals were running twice weekly, often wrapped around weddings or other social gatherings. Organizers called themselves The Strangers of Sham, using the ancient name for the eastern Mediterranean region known as the Levant, and began freely distributing the CDs of the cleric’s sermons.
Jihad was being allowed into the open. Abu Ibrahim said Syrian security officials and presidential advisers attended festivals, one of which was called “The People of Sham Will Now Defeat the Jews and Kill Them All.” Money poured in from Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.
“We even had a Web site,” Abu Ibrahim said.
The young men around the cleric found themselves wielding a surprising amount of power. They were allowed to enforce their strict vision of sharia , or Islamic law, entering houses in the middle of the night to confront people accused of bad behavior.
Abu Ibrahim said their authority rivaled that of the Amn Dawla, or state security. “Everyone knew us,” he said. “We all had big beards. We became thugs.”
In a dictatorship infamous for its intolerance of political Islam, such freedom made some of the cleric’s lieutenants suspicious.
“We asked the sheik why we weren’t being arrested,” said Abu Ibrahim. “He would tell us it was because we weren’t saying anything against the government, that we were focusing on the common enemy, America and Israel, that beards and epaulets were in one trench together.”
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. It has always been so in warfare and it will always be so. The Soviets were everything we hate as a government but they were the Nazis enemy and so became our allies. They were the Nazis allies to begin with…
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