The existence of articles on Google which contain the keywords “Saddam syria wmd” isn’t enough to establish that Saddam gave all his WMD to Syria.
The articles you Googled are from WorldNetDaily (a news source with a “US conservative perspective”), a New York tabloid, a news aggregator, and a right wing blog. Of course, it would be wrong to dismiss them based on my assumptions about the possible bias of the sources, but on reading them they don’t provide much evidence for what you are asserting.
The first three state that various people (a Syrian defector, some US military officials and an Israeli general) claim that it happened (based on ambiguous evidence including sightings of convoys going into Syria). It’s not hard to see that a defector and a general from a country that was about to attack the Syrian nuclear programme might have been strongly motivated to make Syria look bad.
The Hot Air article (the only one published after 2006) quotes a Washington Times reporter quoting a 2004 Washington Times interview with a general saying that Iraq dispersed “documentation and materials”. It then concludes this must refer to WMD, although it could refer to research programmes rather than viable weapons.
You then link to a report that actual WMD investigators hadn’t found any evidence that it happened, but say that “obviously a good chunk of high-up people … disagree”. I don’t think you’ve provided evidence that it’s a “good chunk” of people, and even if it did, their disagreement might be feigned or mistaken. Even the high-up people who authorised the war and were embarrassed by the lack of WMD haven’t cited the Syria explanation.
The last link says that US found 500 degraded chemical artillery shells from the 1980s which were too corroded to be used but might still have some toxicity. They don’t sound like something that could actually be used to cause mass destruction.
So, even based on the evidence you present, it’s not a very convincing case. That’s without bringing any consideration of whether the rest of the known facts are consistent with the assertions. Why would Saddam Hussein, a megalomaniacal dictator, be more concerned about hiding his WMD than his own personal survival? Why would he plan to hide the WMD rather than using them to fight a superior army? Presumably to embarrass the US from beyond the grave? There is also primary evidence that Saddam announced to his generals early in the war that he didn’t have any WMD, although most of them assumed he did and were amazed (see the book Cobra II http://www.amazon.com/Cobra-II-Inside-Invasion-Occupation/dp/0375422625 ). And why didn’t the Syrians provide WMD back to the insurgents (many of whom were initially Ba’athists from the old regime) once the occupation phase began?
I’m not writing this with much hope of changing your mind—I just don’t want anyone else to have to waste time assessing the quality of the evidence you present. I also think it’s ironic that you have written the above comment on a rationality site.
“The last link says that US found 500 degraded chemical artillery shells from the 1980s which were too corroded to be used but might still have some toxicity. They don’t sound like something that could actually be used to cause mass destruction.”
So just because it doesn’t seem to cause mass destruction according to you, it therefore ISN’T a WMD?
WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction. According to the US government and international law, WMD (mosly) means: “nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.” That’s it. This weapon is classified as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention, so by that definition, Saddam had WMDs.
EDIT: Though for the most part, I was called to attention that “WMDs” may have no definiton at all, and instead people use the words NCB instead, for clarification . Also, the source points out that there are new types of WMDs such as conventional weapons and radiological weapons.
Before I reply, let’s just look at the phrase “WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction” and think for a while. Maybe we should taboo the phrase “WMD”.
Was it supposed to be bad for Saddam to have certain objects merely because they were regulated under the Chemical Weapons Convention, or because of their actual potential for harm?
The justification for the war was that Iraq could give dangerous things to terrorists. Or possibly fire them into Israel. It was the actual potential for harm that was the problem.
Rusty shells with traces of sarin degradation products on them might legally be regulated as chemical weapons, but if they have no practical potential to be used to cause harm, they are hardly relevant to the discussion. Especially because they were left over from the 80s, when it is already well known that Iraq had chemical weapons.
Saddam: Hi Osama, in order that you might meet our common objectives, I’m gifting you with several tonnes of scrap metal I dug up. It might have some sarin or related breakdown products, in unknown amounts. All you have to do is smuggle it into the US, find a way to extract the toxic stuff, and disperse it evenly into the subway! Just like the Aum Shin Ryku attack. Except, this time, maybe you will be able to disperse it effectively enough that some people actually die.
Osama: WTF dude?
I know this discussion is off-topic, but I hope people won’t mark it down too much, as it is a salutary example of the massively degrading effect of political topics on quality of discussion.
Before I reply, let’s just look at the phrase “WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction” and think for a while. Maybe we should taboo the phrase “WMD”.
I don’t think that’s enough for clear communication on this issue. People have different views about which kinds of weapons are bad, and for what reason, and what the implications of this badness are.
So, the most constructive thing to do at this point would be for each participant to spell out exactly which weapon production methods (be specific!) you would classify as a “WMD”. Explain its functionality, the difficult parts in making them, and how a terrorist or government would go abount procuring those parts.
Once you’ve explained exactly how these so-called “WMDs” are produced can we come to any agreement about who’s correct regarding Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War.
I don’t think you’re taking this discussion seriously, and that hurts my feelings. I’m not going to vote your comment down, but I am going to unbend a couple of boxes of paperclips at the office tomorrow.
Which really has absolutely nothing to do with my original implicit complaint, which was that my national leaders misled me.
They didn’t say “We need to invade Iraq because the Iraqis have not properly decommissioned tactical chemical weapons left over from the War with Iran. It is our duty to the environmental safety of the Iraqi public to go in there and make sure that those corroding artillery shells are safely destroyed.”
Which really has absolutely nothing to do with my original implicit complaint, which was that my national leaders misled me.
I thought it was that they didn’t have better information than you after all.
In which case I was going to ask whether you really thought your own instincts could do systematically better on such questions than intelligence agencies.
But now it appears you believe they did have better information, but were dishonest in their reporting. If I may ask, how carefully have you considered the hypothesis that they were honestly mistaken, and that your instincts just happened to be correct in this case, more or less by accident? (Many people were skeptical simply because they didn’t like the party in power at the time, which seems dubious as a general recipe for accurately judging, well, anything, but especially questions of foreign intelligence.)
Good questions. I’ll try to answer thoughtfully and honestly.
No, I don’t think my instincts would do better than the professionals; I’m just disappointed that the professionals seem not to have based their judgments on evidence, but rather on instincts only slightly more well informed than my own.
Do I believe they might have been mistaken rather than dishonest? Well, I quite confidently assume that some were mistaken and some were dishonest. The aspect of the situation which leaves me feeling betrayed is that I voted for Bush in 2000, in part because I was intrigued by his “branding” as “the MBA president”. I expected a manager type to be better at picking staff and at insuring that the numbers get crunched (and get crunched honestly) than brilliant/intuitive types like Bill Clinton. Boy, was I wrong.
In 2004, I held my nose and voted for Kerry. I lost. By 2008, I was so disgusted with the Republicans that I voted against McCain, a man I had always liked. I can’t say that I am happy with the result. The Republican party has now turned completely foul, and to make it worse, looks like it will win big with this new look. Obama, who gave me a lot of hope, has now disappointed me almost as much as Bush did.
Yeah, I know I am sliding into Mind Killer territory here. Sorry. Back to your question: dishonest or mistaken? I think a lot of intelligence people were mistaken. I think Cheney, Rumsfeld, and his neocon staff were dishonest. I think Powell was privately honest but publicly dishonest, because he thought it was his job. I think Bush is so completely Meyers-Briggs NF and so completely not ST, that he probably genuinely doesn’t understand how an honest person like himself could possibly be mistaken.
“Yeah, I know I am sliding into Mind Killer territory here. Sorry.”
Is the Mind Killer policy really policy? If it was, your posts would have been downvoted instantly. Instead, you’ve made a total of 24 karma through 3 posts by “sliding” into this Mind Killer territory.
If there is no enforcement (negative Karma) for a policy, and if anybody can hop in Mind Killer territory without suffering any penalty, then this policy doesn’t exist.
A valid complaint. But notice that the third post, where I was deep in politics, received the least karma. The first got points (I think) primarily by noting that judging a politician’s character is at least as difficult as judging a policy position, and the second got points mostly by noting that arguing the semantics of “WMD” was really going off the rails.
In the context of a meeting about planning an invasion of Iraq, it’s hard to interpret this as anything but a list of potential excuses to start the war. It’s not “we must invade if we find Iraq helped with terrorism”, but “a link between Iraq and terrorism is one way to start the war”.
In particular, the last item suggests that the US was willing to use the inspection process to cause conflict with the Iraqis, rather than to determine if they had WMD. If his sole motive was stopping the Iraqis having WMD, his decision process would have been “If the Iraqis don’t cooperate with the inspectors, then we invade”. Instead it seems more like “a dispute about the inspections is another possible way to start the war”. Of course, in practice, the inspections did go ahead, but the US invaded anyway.
This is why you should vote issues and not qualifications. Rumsfeld was a very good administrator and good at making the army do things his way - the problem was he seems to have valued invading Iraq as an end in itself.
In fact, the list of reasons offered for war in this memo are quite “conventional”.
First item: The US and Iraq were still in a formal state of war, with Iraq still under the UN economic siege and being bombed regularly. The Kurdish north of Iraq had been a no-fly zone for Iraqi aircraft for years. If the Iraqi Army had moved north, even before 9/11, it would have been the occasion for war or serious combat.
Second item: Of course, if Iraq had been found assisting 9/11 or the anthrax letters, that would have provided a reason for war.
Third item: There were no UN weapons inspectors in Iraq as of 2001. They were all withdrawn in 1998, prior to “Operation Desert Fox”, in which many supposed weapons sites were bombed, possibly in conjunction with a failed coup attempt. (The American legal basis for instigating regime change in Iraq, the Iraq Liberation Act, was created just a few months before.) A post-9/11 dispute over WMD inspections would have been, first of all, a dispute about getting inspectors back into Iraq.
Having said a few sane and verifiable things, now I want to add a big-picture comment that may sound, and may even be, rather more dubious.
I spent a long time, back in the day, trying to figure out what was actually going on with respect to Iraq. The model I ended up with was a sort of forbidden hybrid of left- and right-wing conspiracy theory, according to which Iraq was involved in al Qaeda’s attacks on America and perhaps also the anthrax letters (that’s the “right-wing” part), and that this was known or suspected by the US executive branch ever since the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre (February 1993), but that they actively hid this from the American public (that’s the “left-wing” part).
In a further extension of the hypothesis or outlook, this was not a unique situation. For example, the terrorist wing of Aum Shinrikyo (which released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995) was full of North Korean agents. But there was nothing to be done openly because North Korea has the bomb. In the case of Iraq, though, the covert attack-and-counterattack did escalate to the point of war.
There are actually many reasons why a government would want to obfuscate about enemy sponsorship of a terrorist attack. First, it may be unable to do anything in retaliation, at least not immediately. Second, it may not want to do anything. Third, it may want to retain strategic flexibility—responding, or not responding—responding “at a time and place of our choosing”. And fourth, once you’ve lied about previous attacks, you can’t turn around and say, sorry, we were hiding the terrible truth from you.
The 1988 Lockerbie bombing may provide another example. The evidence was leading towards Syria as the sponsor, then Iraq invaded Kuwait, and it was deemed useful to have Syria in the coalition. So the CIA found a microchip in the Scottish moors which led to Libya instead.
However, I’m not suggesting that Iraq was a convenient substitute for the true sponsor of 9/11. These episodes or secret wars will all be different in their specifics. The important idea is that governments will manage public perception of these matters according to strategic and other imperatives, such as buying time for a counterattack, or retaining the chance for a future deal.
My point wasn’t that the reasons aren’t “conventional”—it’s the fact that he’s making a list of things that hadn’t happened yet as possible ways to start a war which shows that he was already committed to the invasion no matter what happened.
In fact, none of those things really came to pass (although the Bush administration tried to create the impression that there was a link to 9-11 or anthrax) and yet the invasion still went ahead.
Your conspiracy theory doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the US government wanted to hide Iraq’s supposed involvement in 9-11 and anthrax letters, then why did it repeatedly claim that Iraq was colluding with Al Qaeda between 2001 and the invasion?
None of your reasons for obfuscating make sense, given that the US wanted to invade Iraq anyway, and did so as soon as possible.
Also, even if Aum was full of “North Korean agents” (evidence?), how do you square the idea that “there was nothing to be done openly because North Korea has the bomb” with the fact that the subway attack was in 1995 and North Korea didn’t have the bomb until 2006?
Don’t tell me, North Korea has secretly had the bomb since 1973, right?
Your conspiracy theory doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the US government wanted to hide Iraq’s supposed involvement in 9-11 and anthrax letters, then why did it repeatedly claim that Iraq was colluding with Al Qaeda between 2001 and the invasion?
If you posit that before 9/11, the US government worked to prevent people from understanding what was happening, then after 9/11, some claims of a connection are safe, and some are not safe. Flight TWA 800 blew up over New York on July 17, 1996, July 17 being the day of the Baathist revolution in Iraq. Partisans of a cover-up hold that the investigation was stage-managed so as to favor the hypothesis of an accident, and then retired when enough people had stopped paying attention. It would be risky to revive the discussion of that incident if there was a cover-up. Whereas the idea that Iraqi intelligence had a man in Kurdistan in 2001, teaching Kurdish Islamists rudimentary chemical-warfare techniques, is a safe thing to talk about. It implies the possibility of Saddam getting together with al Qaeda, without implying that they already did so.
An enormous number of claims and counter-claims were made about the Iraq/AQ connection. Who made the claims, why, and with what degree of sincerity and plausibility also varies greatly. You had western intelligence sources feeding stories to tabloids, you had regional enemies of Saddam fabricating tall tales. So there was always a lot of noise. Then there are the key documents forming the “narrative of the state”, like pre-war statements by the US government to the UN or the Congress, or post-war assessments like the 9/11 Commission report. They offer a history resembling the one you find on Wikipedia.
Then there are a few people offering an alternative history, notably Laurie Mylroie and Jayna Davis. I find that these people have, not just opponents who defend an orthodoxy about al Qaeda (e.g. Peter Bergen), but they have friends from the intelligence agencies who I think act more like handlers.
Thus Mylroie was often advised by James Woolsey, Clinton’s first director of intelligence. Mylroie claims that “Ramzi Yousef” and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, masterminds of the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, respectively, were agents of Iraq, working in the jihadist milieu, and she has some evidence for this. However, she then has a contortion of argument according to which these are the names of innocent Kuwaiti guest-workers whose identities were stolen during the Iraqi occupation and used by agents of Iraqi intelligence. Only the real Mylroie fans ever took that argument seriously, and the fact that KSM’s cousin Zahid Sheikh Mohammed is known to be part of the jihadi milieu pretty much proves that the theory of the “innocent original KSM” makes no sense. However, Mylroie’s theories were first propagated in the early 1990s, before al Qaeda became public knowledge. They seem to me like a half-truth, meant to point the finger for WTC 1993 at Iraq, without revealing too much about the guys who liaised with the mujahideen, because these guys were western assets (against Russia) in the 1980s before they became Iraqi assets in the 1990s.
As for Jayna Davis, her specialty was the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and if she had “handlers”, they were Patrick Lang and Larry Johnson, two intelligence veterans who for a time endorsed her discovery of Iraqi connections around the bombing, but who proposed that Iran was the state sponsor. Again, that would fit the half-truth template, but this time from the liberal side of deep politics, the one that didn’t want a war with Iraq. I’ll just point out that in his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke (who is almost the definition of consensus reality when it comes to the recent history of anti-American terrorism) manages to mention that Timothy McVeigh’s pal Terry Nichols was in the Philippines at the same time that KSM and Ramzi Yousef were working on Operation Bojinka, and even muses in his book about whether Nichols met with Yousef to acquire bombing expertise.
I could go on at great length. And then there’s the anthrax letters, which are either an attempt to link 9/11 to the Iraqi WMD issue, or a message from the true sponsor of 9/11 saying we have weaponized anthrax, this is the next stage of escalation, one that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands if it’s released in the open, and not just mailed in letters. Contrary to your assertion that the US invaded Iraq “as soon as possible”, in fact there was a period of 18 months between 9/11 and the invasion, and only at the very last moment was a concrete deadline provided to Saddam, and only after KSM had been captured and publicly displayed in Pakistan. It is at least consistent with the idea that the US spent those 18 months penetrating and shutting down the command-and-control structure in charge of KSM’s part of AQ, before they dared to invade. (And it’s interesting that KSM was apprehended at the home of a microbiologist in Pakistan.)
even if Aum was full of “North Korean agents” (evidence?)
I would have to dig up some old notes, but there were a number of ethnic Koreans playing crucial roles—in the sarin release, in the violent side of the cult, in the assassination of Aum’s “science minister” after the attack—and there’s also a few other connections. There was suspicion on the Japanese right that North Korea was involved. But the very best thing I ever found was a story in a British paper (again, I would have to dig to find it again, but I should be able to do so), on the day before the attack, talking about a North Korean plot to employ BW or CW in Japan. (That’s what I remember, details may be a little off.) I consider that story to be the fruit of western signals intelligence, the collaboration of American and British intelligence, and the use of friendly journalists to act as proxies in communication with rogue states. A related example is that a day or so before the 2006 North Korean nuclear tests, there was a story in the Australian media about North Korean nuclear collaboration with Myanmar. The exact mechanics and motivations remain obscure to me, but I think these “leaks” are meant to be seen by the rogue states (who of course monitor what is being said about them). It’s a form of signaling.
Don’t tell me, North Korea has secretly had the bomb since 1973, right?
The “first Korean nuclear crisis” occurred in 1992-1993. It didn’t really resolve until after Kim Il Sung died in mid-1994. That’s the northeast-Asian geopolitical context to the Aum sarin attack of 1995 - Communism had collapsed in most places outside Korea, North Korea started diverting plutonium from its reactors, the Great Leader who was supposed to reunite Korea died. The regime would have had plans for the achievement of Korean reunification including military methods and guerrilla attacks in South Korea and Japan. So whether they had a working nuke or just the ingredients for it, I don’t know, but the nuclear issue was part of the picture. (It’s even been speculated that Pakistan’s sixth nuke test in 1998 was in fact a North Korean nuke—a way for them to test a device outside their own borders.)
So let’s get this straight: the Iraqis blew up TWA 800, choosing a date that was symbolic to them, and the US covered it up.
Why the cover up? Going back to your four “reasons for obfuscation”:
Because the US was unable to retaliate? - oh no, it was already bombing Iraq and enforcing a no-fly zone at that time. The US just wanted to ignore a terrorist attack by its enemy? Or maybe the Clinton administration wanted to maintain the flexibility to wait for the Iraqis to pull off a much worse terrorist attack, then wait to be voted out out of office, then deflect attention from the link to Iraq by blaming Iraq for colluding with the terrorists? Or maybe the US had “lied about previous attacks”—like the Golf of Tonkin incident—so that naturally stopped them being able to reveal the truth about TWA 800.
I am beginning to see the power of your historical analysis.
Yes, a lot of people said different things about the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. So when Cheney said “there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s” and “an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta”, his agenda there was to distance Iraq from 9/11. Because a lot of people had said all kinds of things, so who would pay attention to the claims of a mere Vice-President?
I hadn’t realised the incredibly compelling link between McVeigh and Al Qaeda: I mean, his friend had once been in the same country as some members of Al Qaeda. How has the mainstream consensus opinion been able to ignore this incredibly compelling historical evidence?
And you’re right, that it took 18 months to organise a large scale invasion with a token international coalition suggests that the US was busy rolling up KSM’s part of Al Qaeda, who had a massive anthrax capability that they chose not to use and that hasn’t come out in any trial since.
The anthrax letters were definitely a message from “from the true sponsor of 9/11”—which according to you is Iraq, right? So why didn’t you just say Iraq? Unless maybe you sense that leaving ambiguous phrases in your theory makes it hard to debunk… but no, that’s ridiculous.
And yeah, I have to concede that if your old notes say that some “ethnic Koreans” played key roles in the Aum attack, then—ignoring the bogus mainstream consensus that the main high-ups in the cult were Japanese—that proves that North Korea must have been behind it. Just like how Timothy McVeigh was an “ethnic Irishman”, and therefore the Republic of Ireland was behind the Oklahoma City bombing. Well, the Irish in collusion with Al Qaeda, of course.
It makes total sense that Western intelligence agencies would find out that the North Korean sponsored sarin gas attack was about to happen, but then instead of helping the Japanese authorities, they would get a journalist to publish a vaguely-related article the day before. Everyone knows that’s the best way to get a message to a rogue state. The message is “We know you’re about to carry out a terrorist attack, but we’re not going to do anything about it except subtly hint at it in the papers”.
And yes, an enrichment programme frozen in 1994 and a “speculated” Korean nuke test in Pakistan in 1998 would definitely have been enough to deter the Japanese from complaining about a sarin gas attack in 1995.
So let’s get this straight: the Iraqis blew up TWA 800, choosing a date that was symbolic to them, and the US covered it up.
Why the cover up?
Let’s review some history.
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait, leading eventually to war with the US. Feb 27, 1991: Iraq withdraws from Kuwait and a ceasefire is negotiated.
End of 1992: a new US president; the military victor in Kuwait was defeated at home. Feb 28, 1993 (anniversary of the withdrawal from Kuwait, more or less): World Trade Centre bombed. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, gets away.
Mid-1993: The US destroys the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad, claiming this is in retaliation for a plot to kill former president Bush.
Jan 1995: Yousef is accidentally captured in the Philippines while working on Operation Bojinka, a plot to blow up a dozen planes in midair. One month later, the CIA had a man in northern Iraq, working with Chalabi’s INC on a plan to overthrow Saddam (but the NSC back in the US aborted the plan at the last moment).
Mid-1996: Yousef is on trial in NYC. July 1996: a plane blows up over NYC, just as in Bojinka, killing everyone on board. August 1996: the Iraqi Army goes north and drives the INC out of Iraqi Kurdistan.
What that says to me is that the Clinton administration thought Iraq was behind the 1993 WTC bombing, and behind Yousef’s terror campaign, but they didn’t want to say this in public. Instead, they tried to deal with the Iraq problem covertly and through other means. As to why Iraq would bomb a plane during the trial of their agent, I’d call it intimidation: don’t bring up the connection, or else we will wage guerrilla war inside your own borders.
I hadn’t realised the incredibly compelling link between McVeigh and Al Qaeda: I mean, his friend had once been in the same country as some members of Al Qaeda.
Quoting Richard Clarke’s book (chapter 5): ”… both Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days … Nichols’s bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earlier in, of all places, Oklahoma City.” (Cebu is the capital of Mindanao, home of the Abu Sayyaf group, the local al Qaeda affiliate.)
The anthrax letters were definitely a message from “from the true sponsor of 9/11”—which according to you is Iraq, right? So why didn’t you just say Iraq?
I was making an argument independently of what came before. If we just look at what happened in 2001, first you had the biggest terrorist attack ever (9/11) and then just one week later, weaponized anthrax was in the mail. So either these acts were carried out by the same group or by different groups. If it was the same group, then, since that anthrax could have killed thousands of people if dispersed in a public space rather than dispatched through the mail, it is reasonable to think that it was a warning of the next step.
And you’re right, that it took 18 months to organise a large scale invasion with a token international coalition suggests that the US was busy rolling up KSM’s part of Al Qaeda, who had a massive anthrax capability that they chose not to use and that hasn’t come out in any trial since.
KSM—the mastermind of 9/11 - was paraded on TV on March 1, 2003. The first concrete deadline for Saddam was announced by Bush on March 17, when he was given 48 hours to get out of Iraq. I wouldn’t say that they had only just caught KSM. Perhaps they had him for a while before that. But I strongly doubt that the timing of the two events was unrelated.
Also, you don’t need to have a massive anthrax capability in order to make a threat like the one in the letters; you just need to produce enough to put in a letter. Either way, if possible, the recipient would want to get to the bottom of that threat and minimize it, before doing anything which risked bringing on a full-scale anthrax attack.
As for Cheney’s remarks about Iraq and al Qaeda… They still fall short of definitely attributing 9/11 to Iraq. And they certainly didn’t attribute anything like TWA 800 or WTC 1993 to Iraq. Politicians modulate what they say with various possible futures in mind. Cheney was pushing a boundary without overstepping it.
[North Korean stuff]
I’ll get back to you on this part. It’s a long time since I thought about this.
You’re not a very good rationalist.
As I have very few good reasons to talk about this stuff, and plenty of reasons not to, perhaps you’re right. :-)
Assertions like this need hyperlinks.
It’s old news; from Google I find the following on the first page for “Saddam syria wmd”: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?pageId=25309 http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/2/18/233023.shtml http://www.nysun.com/foreign/saddams-wmd-moved-to-syria-an-israeli-says/24480/ http://hotair.com/archives/2010/06/05/obama-dni-choice-believes-syrians-have-saddams-wmd/ Et cetera. There was apparently a report saying that they weren’t (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/04/25/AR2005042501554.html), but there’s still obviously a good chunk of high-up people who disagree.
As for us finding WMD, we found about 500 in the three years between the invasion in 2003 and this statement in 2006: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=15918
The existence of articles on Google which contain the keywords “Saddam syria wmd” isn’t enough to establish that Saddam gave all his WMD to Syria.
The articles you Googled are from WorldNetDaily (a news source with a “US conservative perspective”), a New York tabloid, a news aggregator, and a right wing blog. Of course, it would be wrong to dismiss them based on my assumptions about the possible bias of the sources, but on reading them they don’t provide much evidence for what you are asserting.
The first three state that various people (a Syrian defector, some US military officials and an Israeli general) claim that it happened (based on ambiguous evidence including sightings of convoys going into Syria). It’s not hard to see that a defector and a general from a country that was about to attack the Syrian nuclear programme might have been strongly motivated to make Syria look bad.
The Hot Air article (the only one published after 2006) quotes a Washington Times reporter quoting a 2004 Washington Times interview with a general saying that Iraq dispersed “documentation and materials”. It then concludes this must refer to WMD, although it could refer to research programmes rather than viable weapons.
You then link to a report that actual WMD investigators hadn’t found any evidence that it happened, but say that “obviously a good chunk of high-up people … disagree”. I don’t think you’ve provided evidence that it’s a “good chunk” of people, and even if it did, their disagreement might be feigned or mistaken. Even the high-up people who authorised the war and were embarrassed by the lack of WMD haven’t cited the Syria explanation.
The last link says that US found 500 degraded chemical artillery shells from the 1980s which were too corroded to be used but might still have some toxicity. They don’t sound like something that could actually be used to cause mass destruction.
So, even based on the evidence you present, it’s not a very convincing case. That’s without bringing any consideration of whether the rest of the known facts are consistent with the assertions. Why would Saddam Hussein, a megalomaniacal dictator, be more concerned about hiding his WMD than his own personal survival? Why would he plan to hide the WMD rather than using them to fight a superior army? Presumably to embarrass the US from beyond the grave? There is also primary evidence that Saddam announced to his generals early in the war that he didn’t have any WMD, although most of them assumed he did and were amazed (see the book Cobra II http://www.amazon.com/Cobra-II-Inside-Invasion-Occupation/dp/0375422625 ). And why didn’t the Syrians provide WMD back to the insurgents (many of whom were initially Ba’athists from the old regime) once the occupation phase began?
I’m not writing this with much hope of changing your mind—I just don’t want anyone else to have to waste time assessing the quality of the evidence you present. I also think it’s ironic that you have written the above comment on a rationality site.
“The last link says that US found 500 degraded chemical artillery shells from the 1980s which were too corroded to be used but might still have some toxicity. They don’t sound like something that could actually be used to cause mass destruction.”
So just because it doesn’t seem to cause mass destruction according to you, it therefore ISN’T a WMD?
WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction. According to the US government and international law, WMD (mosly) means: “nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons.” That’s it. This weapon is classified as a chemical weapon under the Chemical Weapons Convention, so by that definition, Saddam had WMDs.
Source: http://www.nti.org/f_wmd411/f1a1.html
EDIT: Though for the most part, I was called to attention that “WMDs” may have no definiton at all, and instead people use the words NCB instead, for clarification . Also, the source points out that there are new types of WMDs such as conventional weapons and radiological weapons.
Before I reply, let’s just look at the phrase “WMDs has nothing to do with mass destruction” and think for a while. Maybe we should taboo the phrase “WMD”.
Was it supposed to be bad for Saddam to have certain objects merely because they were regulated under the Chemical Weapons Convention, or because of their actual potential for harm?
The justification for the war was that Iraq could give dangerous things to terrorists. Or possibly fire them into Israel. It was the actual potential for harm that was the problem.
Rusty shells with traces of sarin degradation products on them might legally be regulated as chemical weapons, but if they have no practical potential to be used to cause harm, they are hardly relevant to the discussion. Especially because they were left over from the 80s, when it is already well known that Iraq had chemical weapons.
Saddam: Hi Osama, in order that you might meet our common objectives, I’m gifting you with several tonnes of scrap metal I dug up. It might have some sarin or related breakdown products, in unknown amounts. All you have to do is smuggle it into the US, find a way to extract the toxic stuff, and disperse it evenly into the subway! Just like the Aum Shin Ryku attack. Except, this time, maybe you will be able to disperse it effectively enough that some people actually die.
Osama: WTF dude?
I know this discussion is off-topic, but I hope people won’t mark it down too much, as it is a salutary example of the massively degrading effect of political topics on quality of discussion.
I don’t think that’s enough for clear communication on this issue. People have different views about which kinds of weapons are bad, and for what reason, and what the implications of this badness are.
So, the most constructive thing to do at this point would be for each participant to spell out exactly which weapon production methods (be specific!) you would classify as a “WMD”. Explain its functionality, the difficult parts in making them, and how a terrorist or government would go abount procuring those parts.
Once you’ve explained exactly how these so-called “WMDs” are produced can we come to any agreement about who’s correct regarding Saddam Hussein and the Iraq War.
But what does this have to do with paper clips?
Absolutely nothing. Therefore, there is no danger in telling me how to build WMDs.
I believe that one point MacGyver unfolded a paperclip to disarm a WMD. Clearly you should do your best to minimize WMDs so no one needs to do that.
I don’t think you’re taking this discussion seriously, and that hurts my feelings. I’m not going to vote your comment down, but I am going to unbend a couple of boxes of paperclips at the office tomorrow.
You’re a bad human.
It’s a good thing that, despite your obvious desire to obtain WMD capability, you’re just an AI with no way to control a nuclear weapons factory.
Unless… Clippy, is that Stuxnet worm part of you? ’Fess up.
Which really has absolutely nothing to do with my original implicit complaint, which was that my national leaders misled me.
They didn’t say “We need to invade Iraq because the Iraqis have not properly decommissioned tactical chemical weapons left over from the War with Iran. It is our duty to the environmental safety of the Iraqi public to go in there and make sure that those corroding artillery shells are safely destroyed.”
I thought it was that they didn’t have better information than you after all.
In which case I was going to ask whether you really thought your own instincts could do systematically better on such questions than intelligence agencies.
But now it appears you believe they did have better information, but were dishonest in their reporting. If I may ask, how carefully have you considered the hypothesis that they were honestly mistaken, and that your instincts just happened to be correct in this case, more or less by accident? (Many people were skeptical simply because they didn’t like the party in power at the time, which seems dubious as a general recipe for accurately judging, well, anything, but especially questions of foreign intelligence.)
Good questions. I’ll try to answer thoughtfully and honestly.
No, I don’t think my instincts would do better than the professionals; I’m just disappointed that the professionals seem not to have based their judgments on evidence, but rather on instincts only slightly more well informed than my own.
Do I believe they might have been mistaken rather than dishonest? Well, I quite confidently assume that some were mistaken and some were dishonest. The aspect of the situation which leaves me feeling betrayed is that I voted for Bush in 2000, in part because I was intrigued by his “branding” as “the MBA president”. I expected a manager type to be better at picking staff and at insuring that the numbers get crunched (and get crunched honestly) than brilliant/intuitive types like Bill Clinton. Boy, was I wrong.
In 2004, I held my nose and voted for Kerry. I lost. By 2008, I was so disgusted with the Republicans that I voted against McCain, a man I had always liked. I can’t say that I am happy with the result. The Republican party has now turned completely foul, and to make it worse, looks like it will win big with this new look. Obama, who gave me a lot of hope, has now disappointed me almost as much as Bush did.
Yeah, I know I am sliding into Mind Killer territory here. Sorry. Back to your question: dishonest or mistaken? I think a lot of intelligence people were mistaken. I think Cheney, Rumsfeld, and his neocon staff were dishonest. I think Powell was privately honest but publicly dishonest, because he thought it was his job. I think Bush is so completely Meyers-Briggs NF and so completely not ST, that he probably genuinely doesn’t understand how an honest person like himself could possibly be mistaken.
“Yeah, I know I am sliding into Mind Killer territory here. Sorry.”
Is the Mind Killer policy really policy? If it was, your posts would have been downvoted instantly. Instead, you’ve made a total of 24 karma through 3 posts by “sliding” into this Mind Killer territory.
If there is no enforcement (negative Karma) for a policy, and if anybody can hop in Mind Killer territory without suffering any penalty, then this policy doesn’t exist.
A valid complaint. But notice that the third post, where I was deep in politics, received the least karma. The first got points (I think) primarily by noting that judging a politician’s character is at least as difficult as judging a policy position, and the second got points mostly by noting that arguing the semantics of “WMD” was really going off the rails.
Just recently, a piece of evidence has come to light which makes it very hard to believe that the motivation for the war was an honest fear of WMDs.
Rumsfeld wrote talking points for a November 2001 meeting with Tommy Franks containing the section:
“How start?
Saddam moves against Kurds in north?
US discovers Saddam connection to Sept. 11 attacks or to anthrax attacks?
Dispute over WMD inspections?
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB326/index.htm
In the context of a meeting about planning an invasion of Iraq, it’s hard to interpret this as anything but a list of potential excuses to start the war. It’s not “we must invade if we find Iraq helped with terrorism”, but “a link between Iraq and terrorism is one way to start the war”.
In particular, the last item suggests that the US was willing to use the inspection process to cause conflict with the Iraqis, rather than to determine if they had WMD. If his sole motive was stopping the Iraqis having WMD, his decision process would have been “If the Iraqis don’t cooperate with the inspectors, then we invade”. Instead it seems more like “a dispute about the inspections is another possible way to start the war”. Of course, in practice, the inspections did go ahead, but the US invaded anyway.
This is why you should vote issues and not qualifications. Rumsfeld was a very good administrator and good at making the army do things his way - the problem was he seems to have valued invading Iraq as an end in itself.
In fact, the list of reasons offered for war in this memo are quite “conventional”.
First item: The US and Iraq were still in a formal state of war, with Iraq still under the UN economic siege and being bombed regularly. The Kurdish north of Iraq had been a no-fly zone for Iraqi aircraft for years. If the Iraqi Army had moved north, even before 9/11, it would have been the occasion for war or serious combat.
Second item: Of course, if Iraq had been found assisting 9/11 or the anthrax letters, that would have provided a reason for war.
Third item: There were no UN weapons inspectors in Iraq as of 2001. They were all withdrawn in 1998, prior to “Operation Desert Fox”, in which many supposed weapons sites were bombed, possibly in conjunction with a failed coup attempt. (The American legal basis for instigating regime change in Iraq, the Iraq Liberation Act, was created just a few months before.) A post-9/11 dispute over WMD inspections would have been, first of all, a dispute about getting inspectors back into Iraq.
Having said a few sane and verifiable things, now I want to add a big-picture comment that may sound, and may even be, rather more dubious.
I spent a long time, back in the day, trying to figure out what was actually going on with respect to Iraq. The model I ended up with was a sort of forbidden hybrid of left- and right-wing conspiracy theory, according to which Iraq was involved in al Qaeda’s attacks on America and perhaps also the anthrax letters (that’s the “right-wing” part), and that this was known or suspected by the US executive branch ever since the first attempt to destroy the World Trade Centre (February 1993), but that they actively hid this from the American public (that’s the “left-wing” part).
In a further extension of the hypothesis or outlook, this was not a unique situation. For example, the terrorist wing of Aum Shinrikyo (which released nerve gas in the Tokyo subway in 1995) was full of North Korean agents. But there was nothing to be done openly because North Korea has the bomb. In the case of Iraq, though, the covert attack-and-counterattack did escalate to the point of war.
There are actually many reasons why a government would want to obfuscate about enemy sponsorship of a terrorist attack. First, it may be unable to do anything in retaliation, at least not immediately. Second, it may not want to do anything. Third, it may want to retain strategic flexibility—responding, or not responding—responding “at a time and place of our choosing”. And fourth, once you’ve lied about previous attacks, you can’t turn around and say, sorry, we were hiding the terrible truth from you.
The 1988 Lockerbie bombing may provide another example. The evidence was leading towards Syria as the sponsor, then Iraq invaded Kuwait, and it was deemed useful to have Syria in the coalition. So the CIA found a microchip in the Scottish moors which led to Libya instead.
However, I’m not suggesting that Iraq was a convenient substitute for the true sponsor of 9/11. These episodes or secret wars will all be different in their specifics. The important idea is that governments will manage public perception of these matters according to strategic and other imperatives, such as buying time for a counterattack, or retaining the chance for a future deal.
My point wasn’t that the reasons aren’t “conventional”—it’s the fact that he’s making a list of things that hadn’t happened yet as possible ways to start a war which shows that he was already committed to the invasion no matter what happened.
In fact, none of those things really came to pass (although the Bush administration tried to create the impression that there was a link to 9-11 or anthrax) and yet the invasion still went ahead.
Your conspiracy theory doesn’t make a lot of sense. If the US government wanted to hide Iraq’s supposed involvement in 9-11 and anthrax letters, then why did it repeatedly claim that Iraq was colluding with Al Qaeda between 2001 and the invasion?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saddam_Hussein_and_al-Qaeda_link_allegations
None of your reasons for obfuscating make sense, given that the US wanted to invade Iraq anyway, and did so as soon as possible.
Also, even if Aum was full of “North Korean agents” (evidence?), how do you square the idea that “there was nothing to be done openly because North Korea has the bomb” with the fact that the subway attack was in 1995 and North Korea didn’t have the bomb until 2006?
Don’t tell me, North Korea has secretly had the bomb since 1973, right?
If you posit that before 9/11, the US government worked to prevent people from understanding what was happening, then after 9/11, some claims of a connection are safe, and some are not safe. Flight TWA 800 blew up over New York on July 17, 1996, July 17 being the day of the Baathist revolution in Iraq. Partisans of a cover-up hold that the investigation was stage-managed so as to favor the hypothesis of an accident, and then retired when enough people had stopped paying attention. It would be risky to revive the discussion of that incident if there was a cover-up. Whereas the idea that Iraqi intelligence had a man in Kurdistan in 2001, teaching Kurdish Islamists rudimentary chemical-warfare techniques, is a safe thing to talk about. It implies the possibility of Saddam getting together with al Qaeda, without implying that they already did so.
An enormous number of claims and counter-claims were made about the Iraq/AQ connection. Who made the claims, why, and with what degree of sincerity and plausibility also varies greatly. You had western intelligence sources feeding stories to tabloids, you had regional enemies of Saddam fabricating tall tales. So there was always a lot of noise. Then there are the key documents forming the “narrative of the state”, like pre-war statements by the US government to the UN or the Congress, or post-war assessments like the 9/11 Commission report. They offer a history resembling the one you find on Wikipedia.
Then there are a few people offering an alternative history, notably Laurie Mylroie and Jayna Davis. I find that these people have, not just opponents who defend an orthodoxy about al Qaeda (e.g. Peter Bergen), but they have friends from the intelligence agencies who I think act more like handlers.
Thus Mylroie was often advised by James Woolsey, Clinton’s first director of intelligence. Mylroie claims that “Ramzi Yousef” and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, masterminds of the 1993 and 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre, respectively, were agents of Iraq, working in the jihadist milieu, and she has some evidence for this. However, she then has a contortion of argument according to which these are the names of innocent Kuwaiti guest-workers whose identities were stolen during the Iraqi occupation and used by agents of Iraqi intelligence. Only the real Mylroie fans ever took that argument seriously, and the fact that KSM’s cousin Zahid Sheikh Mohammed is known to be part of the jihadi milieu pretty much proves that the theory of the “innocent original KSM” makes no sense. However, Mylroie’s theories were first propagated in the early 1990s, before al Qaeda became public knowledge. They seem to me like a half-truth, meant to point the finger for WTC 1993 at Iraq, without revealing too much about the guys who liaised with the mujahideen, because these guys were western assets (against Russia) in the 1980s before they became Iraqi assets in the 1990s.
As for Jayna Davis, her specialty was the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, and if she had “handlers”, they were Patrick Lang and Larry Johnson, two intelligence veterans who for a time endorsed her discovery of Iraqi connections around the bombing, but who proposed that Iran was the state sponsor. Again, that would fit the half-truth template, but this time from the liberal side of deep politics, the one that didn’t want a war with Iraq. I’ll just point out that in his book Against All Enemies, Richard Clarke (who is almost the definition of consensus reality when it comes to the recent history of anti-American terrorism) manages to mention that Timothy McVeigh’s pal Terry Nichols was in the Philippines at the same time that KSM and Ramzi Yousef were working on Operation Bojinka, and even muses in his book about whether Nichols met with Yousef to acquire bombing expertise.
I could go on at great length. And then there’s the anthrax letters, which are either an attempt to link 9/11 to the Iraqi WMD issue, or a message from the true sponsor of 9/11 saying we have weaponized anthrax, this is the next stage of escalation, one that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands if it’s released in the open, and not just mailed in letters. Contrary to your assertion that the US invaded Iraq “as soon as possible”, in fact there was a period of 18 months between 9/11 and the invasion, and only at the very last moment was a concrete deadline provided to Saddam, and only after KSM had been captured and publicly displayed in Pakistan. It is at least consistent with the idea that the US spent those 18 months penetrating and shutting down the command-and-control structure in charge of KSM’s part of AQ, before they dared to invade. (And it’s interesting that KSM was apprehended at the home of a microbiologist in Pakistan.)
I would have to dig up some old notes, but there were a number of ethnic Koreans playing crucial roles—in the sarin release, in the violent side of the cult, in the assassination of Aum’s “science minister” after the attack—and there’s also a few other connections. There was suspicion on the Japanese right that North Korea was involved. But the very best thing I ever found was a story in a British paper (again, I would have to dig to find it again, but I should be able to do so), on the day before the attack, talking about a North Korean plot to employ BW or CW in Japan. (That’s what I remember, details may be a little off.) I consider that story to be the fruit of western signals intelligence, the collaboration of American and British intelligence, and the use of friendly journalists to act as proxies in communication with rogue states. A related example is that a day or so before the 2006 North Korean nuclear tests, there was a story in the Australian media about North Korean nuclear collaboration with Myanmar. The exact mechanics and motivations remain obscure to me, but I think these “leaks” are meant to be seen by the rogue states (who of course monitor what is being said about them). It’s a form of signaling.
The “first Korean nuclear crisis” occurred in 1992-1993. It didn’t really resolve until after Kim Il Sung died in mid-1994. That’s the northeast-Asian geopolitical context to the Aum sarin attack of 1995 - Communism had collapsed in most places outside Korea, North Korea started diverting plutonium from its reactors, the Great Leader who was supposed to reunite Korea died. The regime would have had plans for the achievement of Korean reunification including military methods and guerrilla attacks in South Korea and Japan. So whether they had a working nuke or just the ingredients for it, I don’t know, but the nuclear issue was part of the picture. (It’s even been speculated that Pakistan’s sixth nuke test in 1998 was in fact a North Korean nuke—a way for them to test a device outside their own borders.)
So let’s get this straight: the Iraqis blew up TWA 800, choosing a date that was symbolic to them, and the US covered it up.
Why the cover up? Going back to your four “reasons for obfuscation”:
Because the US was unable to retaliate? - oh no, it was already bombing Iraq and enforcing a no-fly zone at that time. The US just wanted to ignore a terrorist attack by its enemy? Or maybe the Clinton administration wanted to maintain the flexibility to wait for the Iraqis to pull off a much worse terrorist attack, then wait to be voted out out of office, then deflect attention from the link to Iraq by blaming Iraq for colluding with the terrorists? Or maybe the US had “lied about previous attacks”—like the Golf of Tonkin incident—so that naturally stopped them being able to reveal the truth about TWA 800.
I am beginning to see the power of your historical analysis.
Yes, a lot of people said different things about the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda. So when Cheney said “there was a relationship between Iraq and al-Qaida that stretched back through most of the decade of the ’90s” and “an Iraqi intelligence officer met with Mohammed Atta”, his agenda there was to distance Iraq from 9/11. Because a lot of people had said all kinds of things, so who would pay attention to the claims of a mere Vice-President?
I hadn’t realised the incredibly compelling link between McVeigh and Al Qaeda: I mean, his friend had once been in the same country as some members of Al Qaeda. How has the mainstream consensus opinion been able to ignore this incredibly compelling historical evidence?
And you’re right, that it took 18 months to organise a large scale invasion with a token international coalition suggests that the US was busy rolling up KSM’s part of Al Qaeda, who had a massive anthrax capability that they chose not to use and that hasn’t come out in any trial since.
The anthrax letters were definitely a message from “from the true sponsor of 9/11”—which according to you is Iraq, right? So why didn’t you just say Iraq? Unless maybe you sense that leaving ambiguous phrases in your theory makes it hard to debunk… but no, that’s ridiculous.
And yeah, I have to concede that if your old notes say that some “ethnic Koreans” played key roles in the Aum attack, then—ignoring the bogus mainstream consensus that the main high-ups in the cult were Japanese—that proves that North Korea must have been behind it. Just like how Timothy McVeigh was an “ethnic Irishman”, and therefore the Republic of Ireland was behind the Oklahoma City bombing. Well, the Irish in collusion with Al Qaeda, of course.
It makes total sense that Western intelligence agencies would find out that the North Korean sponsored sarin gas attack was about to happen, but then instead of helping the Japanese authorities, they would get a journalist to publish a vaguely-related article the day before. Everyone knows that’s the best way to get a message to a rogue state. The message is “We know you’re about to carry out a terrorist attack, but we’re not going to do anything about it except subtly hint at it in the papers”.
And yes, an enrichment programme frozen in 1994 and a “speculated” Korean nuke test in Pakistan in 1998 would definitely have been enough to deter the Japanese from complaining about a sarin gas attack in 1995.
You’re not a very good rationalist.
Let’s review some history.
1990: Iraq invades Kuwait, leading eventually to war with the US. Feb 27, 1991: Iraq withdraws from Kuwait and a ceasefire is negotiated.
End of 1992: a new US president; the military victor in Kuwait was defeated at home. Feb 28, 1993 (anniversary of the withdrawal from Kuwait, more or less): World Trade Centre bombed. The mastermind, Ramzi Yousef, gets away.
Mid-1993: The US destroys the headquarters of Iraqi intelligence in Baghdad, claiming this is in retaliation for a plot to kill former president Bush.
Jan 1995: Yousef is accidentally captured in the Philippines while working on Operation Bojinka, a plot to blow up a dozen planes in midair. One month later, the CIA had a man in northern Iraq, working with Chalabi’s INC on a plan to overthrow Saddam (but the NSC back in the US aborted the plan at the last moment).
Mid-1996: Yousef is on trial in NYC. July 1996: a plane blows up over NYC, just as in Bojinka, killing everyone on board. August 1996: the Iraqi Army goes north and drives the INC out of Iraqi Kurdistan.
What that says to me is that the Clinton administration thought Iraq was behind the 1993 WTC bombing, and behind Yousef’s terror campaign, but they didn’t want to say this in public. Instead, they tried to deal with the Iraq problem covertly and through other means. As to why Iraq would bomb a plane during the trial of their agent, I’d call it intimidation: don’t bring up the connection, or else we will wage guerrilla war inside your own borders.
Quoting Richard Clarke’s book (chapter 5): ”… both Ramzi Yousef and Terry Nichols had been in the city of Cebu on the same days … Nichols’s bombs did not work before his Philippine stay and were deadly when he returned. We also know that Nichols continued to call Cebu long after his wife returned to the United States. The final coincidence is that several al Qaeda operatives had attended a radical Islamic conference a few years earlier in, of all places, Oklahoma City.” (Cebu is the capital of Mindanao, home of the Abu Sayyaf group, the local al Qaeda affiliate.)
I was making an argument independently of what came before. If we just look at what happened in 2001, first you had the biggest terrorist attack ever (9/11) and then just one week later, weaponized anthrax was in the mail. So either these acts were carried out by the same group or by different groups. If it was the same group, then, since that anthrax could have killed thousands of people if dispersed in a public space rather than dispatched through the mail, it is reasonable to think that it was a warning of the next step.
KSM—the mastermind of 9/11 - was paraded on TV on March 1, 2003. The first concrete deadline for Saddam was announced by Bush on March 17, when he was given 48 hours to get out of Iraq. I wouldn’t say that they had only just caught KSM. Perhaps they had him for a while before that. But I strongly doubt that the timing of the two events was unrelated.
Also, you don’t need to have a massive anthrax capability in order to make a threat like the one in the letters; you just need to produce enough to put in a letter. Either way, if possible, the recipient would want to get to the bottom of that threat and minimize it, before doing anything which risked bringing on a full-scale anthrax attack.
As for Cheney’s remarks about Iraq and al Qaeda… They still fall short of definitely attributing 9/11 to Iraq. And they certainly didn’t attribute anything like TWA 800 or WTC 1993 to Iraq. Politicians modulate what they say with various possible futures in mind. Cheney was pushing a boundary without overstepping it.
I’ll get back to you on this part. It’s a long time since I thought about this.
As I have very few good reasons to talk about this stuff, and plenty of reasons not to, perhaps you’re right. :-)