Pincus's
report in today's WaPo on the DIA leak raises again the question of whether the US invasion of Iraq was a conscious strategy of Al Qaeda in order to build animosity towards the US in the Sunni Arab world. In other words, did Al Qaeda game Bush into launching the Iraq war?
More on the flip...
Now, this is clearly tin-foil hat territory considering the kind of evidence we have to work with. It's worth noting too that the blogosphere is already starting to put out different theories of what may have happened.
Atrios for example, basing himself on a
Newsweek story, suggests al-Libi may have been tortured into giving up bad information. While I'm sympathetic to that argument, because I'm sure that torture generally produces unreliable intelligence, the chronology given in the Newsweek piece doesn't really add up. Al-Libi was detained in November 2001, the DIA knew in January or February 2002 that his information was unreliable, and the Bush administration memos justifying torture didn't start appearing until August 2002.
Beyond that, however, is the exact language the DIA report used to describe al-Libi's information. As quoted by Pincus, the report says:
it is more likely this individual [al-Libi] is intentionally misleading the debriefers.
The DIA based this conclusion on the fact that al-Libi "could not name any Iraqis involved, any chemical or biological material used or where the training [of al Qaeda operatives by Iraqis] occurred."
I've always felt that al Qaeda has benefitted globally from the Iraq war, and bin Laden is certainly smart enough to have realized that a US invasion in the Middle East could prove to be a recruiting boon. Bush's animosity to Saddam Hussein was well known, even well before 9-11.
We know that Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan helped bring down the Soviet Union. Was 9-11 part of a plot to try to do the same thing to the twentieth-century's other super power in Iraq?