Iraq: Democratic Terrorist Safe Haven

Authored by Michael Pate on November 30th, 2003 at 2:13 PM

And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation in every region now has a decision to make: Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime. - George W. Bush

A growing number of counterterrorism experts are challenging President Bush’s assertion that Iraq is a major battle in the war against terrorism and are questioning whether the U.S. invasion of Iraq has hurt rather than helped the global battle against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. - Warren P. Strobel

Fighting Al Qaeda isn’t easy. There’s no central point to hit them. You have to destroy them, cell by cell. That’s why President Bush’s actions are so disturbing. Essentially he said “It’s too hard to figure out how to destroy Al Qaeda, so I’ll attack Iraq and build a new government there”. It’s practically appeasement, a capitulation to the worst enemy America has faced since Hitler. - Oliver Willis

A radical Islamist group � with possible links to Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein � is growing and threatening the stability of the Kurdish region in northern Iraq. The group � Ansar al-Islam � emerged just days before the Sept. 11 attacks on the US. It delivered a fatwa, or manifesto, to the citizens in mountain villages against “the blasphemous secularist, political, social, and cultural” society there, according to Kurdish party leaders. Since, Ansar al-Islam has nearly doubled in size to 700, including Iraqis, Jordanians, Moroccans, Palestinians, and Afghans � a composition similar to the multinational Al Qaeda network. Villagers here claim it has ransacked and razed beauty salons, burned schools for girls, and murdered women in the streets for refusing to wear the burqa. It has seized a Taliban-style enclave of 4,000 civilians and several villages near the Iran border. - Catherine Taylor

Graham often suggested during the Iraq debate that Syria, with its support for terrorist Hezbollah, was a greater threat. Fine. What would Graham do? He now says he supports diplomacy. So his current position apparently is that he would have left Saddam in place in order to better pursue … diplomacy with Syria. Even an opportunistic presidential candidate should see that toppling Saddam has drastically increased U.S. leverage, putting us in a better position to pressure the terror-tainted states of Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. - Rich Lowry

Al Qaeda doesn’t discriminate. Their hatred doesn’t respect the limits of nationality, geography, or religion. And now the Saudis are paying the price with innocent lives. It’s time for them to take real action to destroy Al Qaeda from the top down. It’s not enough for them to pursue terrorism within their own borders. They need to join us in the battle worldwide. - Wesley Clark

George W. Bush said that terrorists would be hunted down and nations that harbored them would pay the price. It seems most everyone agrees with that, except in the case of… Iraq. No matter how many ties existed between Iraq and terrorists, and no matter how many al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist cells existed in Iraq, it is somehow a distraction from the War on Terror to go after them.

I agree with Wesley Clark when he says that al-Qaeda doesn’t discriminate. It just seems unfortunate that the Democratic Party can’t say the same. Using their tortured logic, terrorism would have flourished in Iraq for generations.

Links in this entry:

Bob Graham's Loopy Foreign Policy
General Wesley Clark Remarks on Al Qaeda
George Bush: Soft On Terror
Taliban-style group grows in Iraq
Terror experts fault Iraq war
Transcript of President Bush's address

Comments

Al Qaeda's links to Saudi Arabia are clear, the links with Iraq more opportunistic than cohesive and post-Saddam. Bush essentially said: to defeat Al Qaeda, we'll fight an unrelated war in Iraq.

Oliver, I agree with you. The links that tie Saudi Arabia to al-Qaeda are certainly better documented than those to Iraq.

But I am not sure how launching an incursion into Saudi Arabia would have played in the Arab world. Osama bin Laden used the presence of troops placed to protect the country to inflame some of the more fanatical elements of the Arab World. A full-scale invasion by Western forces will probably be seen as a negative.

I, for one, hope that it never becomes necessary.

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