“Can you just picture what would have happened if al Qaeda attacked America with deadly weapons acquired from Baghdad, and had President Bush rejected intelligence reports about WMDs?” TV/Radio personality Bill O'Reilly spun in a July 22 column. “My God! President Bush would have gone down in history as the biggest incompetent of all time.”
O'Reilly wrote that he came to this conclusion because “At this point, we have four independent sources that say there was no lying by President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair regarding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.” This last sentence is at least true as far as it goes; the 9/11 Commission report and the Senator Select Intelligence Committee (and foreign sources) reported that intelligence agencies had given the Bush administration incorrect information that the Hussein regime in Iraq maintained huge chemical and biological weapons stockpiles (WMD) before the war.
The O'Reilly all spin zone
O'Reilly's problem is that there were no al Qaeda ties with Hussein and that his nightmare scenario was pure spin. The Senate Select Intelligence Committee report concluded the CIA had repeatedly informed the administration that Hussein “generally viewed Islamic extremism, including the school of Islam known as Wahhabism, as a threat to his regime, noting that he had executed extremists from both the Sunni and Shi'a sects to disrupt their organizations. The CIA provided two specific HUMINT [Human Intelligence] reports that support this assessment, both of which indicated that Saddam Hussein's regime arrested and in some cases executed Wahhabists and other Islamic extremists that opposed him. The CIA also provided a HUMINT report … that indicated the regime sought to prevent Iraqi youth from joining al Qaeda.”
In addition, the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002 concluded that Iraq wouldn't cooperate with al Qaeda because they feared “Iraqi involvement would provide Washington a stronger case for making war.”
This means the Bush administration listened to erroneous intelligence on WMD, but ignored accurate intelligence that there was no relationship between al Qaeda and Hussein's Iraq.
Worse, evidence from the Senate committee report revealed that the Bush administration willingly put the U.S. in greater danger by attacking Iraq. Intelligence Committee member Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) summed up the terrorist threat from Iraq: “The Intelligence Community did not believe that Saddam Hussein was likely to use his own forces or an outside group like al Qaeda to attack the United States – with one important caveat. The Intelligence Community believed that an impending U.S.-led attack to remove Hussein from power would increase the likelihood of a terror attack.” In other words, the U.S. invasion put American citizens at risk for a terror attack, when there was no threat of an attack from Iraq before the invasion.
O'Reilly may claim to have a “no spin zone,” but his column was nothing but pure spin that misled the public. Millions of Americans have already heard the same foolish arguments made on Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and any number of other radio talk shows. “Oh, but there were ties,” the talk show hosts tell us. “Gee, such and such an Iraqi intelligence officer met with a member of al Qaeda in 1998. Bush was right, don't you know.” The word “ties” is used with such weak evidence by talk show hosts these days that the wildest fantasies of the left about Joe McCarthy's communist accusations now look like iron-clad cases by comparison.
Since even Secretary of State Colin Powell has admitted, in a January 8, 2004 press conference, that “I have not seen smoking-gun, concrete evidence about the connection,” O'Reilly, Limbaugh and Hannity are increasingly looking like the pet shop owner in Monty Python's pet shop skit. The “al Qaeda ties” parrot, they tell us, isn't dead – it's just sleeping. Forget the fact that our intelligence agencies reported categorically that Iraq and al Qaeda were enemies (the Brits' intelligence agency said the same), and that Hussein and bin Laden hated each other. Forget the fact that the recently released Senate intelligence report on the war said that Hussein had ordered (and carried out) the execution of al Qaeda members in the past. All of these reported contacts together don't amount to anything more than the fact that Iraqi intelligence had a real intelligence agency that – shocker of all shockers – kept tabs on enemies of the state. (Would that we had such an intelligence agency.) “Oh, but they did have u2018ties.'” Yeah, right.
In fact, none of the assertions of al Qaeda contacts by the CIA amounted to anything even close to the ties other Middle Eastern nations had with al Qaeda, including nuclear power Pakistan.
The lack of any meaningful ties to al Qaeda is the elephant under the table no one on the Establishment right is talking about. Certainly, you won't find it on talk radio today, or on war-mongering neo-con “conservative” magazines like National Review. I've heard that National Review founder William F. Buckley now regrets he backed the recent Iraq war. “Saddam Hussein wasn't the kind of extra-territorial menace that was assumed by the administration one year ago,” Buckley told the New York Times. “If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war.”
I confess that I was never a partisan of Bill Buckley. The Buckley I've read since the mid-1980s had all of the condescending sarcasm and vanity of Erasmus with none of the wit or clarity. If his columns were readable at one time, they long since ceased to be so. The last time I was able to stomach reading one of his columns a few years ago, Buckley praised himself no fewer than five times in the space of 500 words. I blurted out to a colleague that I had never read such a self-absorbed column, and wondered if he had typed it out one-handed after downing a double dose of Viagra. Nevertheless, Buckley's mea culpa puts him a step above the talk show robots who spew out undigested Republican Party talking points.
But there are sources of truth on the Internet for those who seek it. LewRockwell.com is one of those sources of truth.
I wrote on this website before the war that Hussein and bin Laden “hate each other because one is a radical Islamic militant and the other is an atheist” and the two “are traditional and long-standing enemies.” These statements were not based upon any crystal ball I possessed, or any access to secret government intelligence, but upon publicly leaked information available to everyone before the war. I also had the benefit of the fact that the Bush administration didn't leak any credible intelligence about al Qaeda ties (though they did leak some “ties” that were quickly proven to be fraudulent information), even though it would have strongly buttressed their public case for the war.
The truth is now out: We were lied into war, and the vain repetition of spinmeisters to the contrary won't change this fact. Now that you know this, what are you going to do about it?
July 27, 2004
