Hurrah! We've reached the final installment of my summary of the IDA Saddam & Terrorism report. You can find Part 1 here..., Part 2 here... and Part 3 here..
So far, we've learned that while Saddam had many ties to terrorist organizations and definitely made trouble for his neighbors, evidence does not suggest that he was in ANY position to be a real threat to the United States.
I joked in Part 1 that I read the report, so you don't have to, but..
No, actually you should read this report. You can find it here... on the right-hand side (big pdf!)
I think you should read it because anything the current administration doesn't want you to easily access must be GOOD stuff. Read it and start asking questions...
What follows is a summary of "The Business of Terror" and the conclusions of the entire paper...
THE BUSINESS OF TERROR
Venture Capitalists for Terrorists:
Saddam Hussein was willing to use terrorism as a method of achieving
his goals. This often required direct and indirect cooperation with movements and organizations with "diametrically opposed long-term goals." (p. 41)
A description of the indirect cooperation in the 1990's between Saddam's pan-Arab movement and bin Laden's revolutionary Islamic movement begins with the similarities of the groups:
...both Saddam and bin Laden wanted the West, particularly
the United States, out of Muslim lands (or in the view of Saddam, the "Arab nation"). Both wanted to create a single powerful state that would take its place as a global superpower. (p. 41)
But that is the extent of the similarity-- bin Laden's goal was to restore the Islamic caliphate (and this is still his goal) while Saddam was working toward being the secular ruler of a huge united Arab nation with Iraq as its center.
The report makes it clear that their competing visions made any sort of long-term cooperation impossible. Saddam ran a fairly effective secular government and his regime was good at suppressing internal challenges. His Iraq would not fit into bin Laden's Islamic religious state, and he monitored and cracked down on radical Islamic movements when they were threats. However, Saddam and bin Laden were recruiting within the same demographic, and overlap was inevitable when
they were monitoring, contacting, financing, and training members of the same groups.
Common interests, even without common cause, increased the aggregate terror threat. (p. 42)
Because both groups were operating and financing terrorist groups in the region, more terrorist operations were in place and completing missions.
The Terror "Business" Model of Saddam Hussein:
+ Saddam supported a wide variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. He maintained training camps for foreign "fighters" who came from any of these groups.
+ He was also a financial supporter for some of the groups, particularly those that were Palestinian.
+ Saddam had to balance the benefits and potential costs these relationships had, and he would bounce between severing ties and arresting members of groups and opening up relations with new groups based on what was best for his plans.
+ The Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) felt that working with some of the Islamic groups was actually a detriment to the Iraq cause and did not open ties with groups that they felt were provoking the West through the use of "religious terror" (p. 43)
+ Saddam also used terrorist events he had no direct role in to his advantage when it was possible. For example, after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Iraq had one of the suspects, Abdul Rahman Yasin, the alleged ringleader in custody. His interrogation left Saddam with the impression that Yasin could not have the ringleader, and this must be part of a larger plot by American intelligence. Information about the arrest was let out a little each day, so as to buy more time to interrogate Yasin about who he was working for and to not be seen as working with the United States. The tactic worked, and Yemen is still wanted for his role in the bombing. (p. 59, Note 102)
CONCLUSION
The conclusion of this paper asks
Is there anything in the captured archives to indicate that Saddam had the will to use his terrorist capabilities directly against United States?
There are two answers to this question:
Prior to the 1991 Gulf War with the United States, yes.
[19 April 1990]
"If America interferes we will strike. You know us, we are not the talkative type who holds the microphone and says things only, we do what we say. Maybe we cannot reach Washington but we can send someone with an explosive belt to reach Washington."
"We can send people to Washington... a person with explosive belt around
him could throw himself on Bush's car.
Saddam's will to use terror directly against the United States at the time of the beginning of OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM in 2003 is not clear at all. Years of UN sanctions had depleted his power in shaping world events. He used terrorist operations routinely as part of his goal of uniting an Arab state. His ability and willingness to directly attack the US is not present in any of the documents seized or in the transcripts of meetings prior to the invasion or in transcripts of interrogations of captured Iraqis. The evidence just isn't there...
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My "special comment":
The evidence just isn't there... the evidence that was supposed to be bullet-proof. Saddam Hussein was indeed using terrorist tactics in the countries surrounding Iraq and in Iraq as well. But there was no "imminent threat" to the United States, and there was no direct link to al Queda. Saddam had nothing to do with the attacks on September 11, 2001.
And yet we are five years and one day into a war started because we were told that all of this was true, and that there was lots of evidence for it. Well, all of the "evidence" has unraveled over the course of the past five tears, and the report that the Pentagon thought would help justify it all up has instead made it clear...
Saddam Hussein may have been a bad man, but there was no need for us to attack and tear apart the country he lead. He was no threat to us or our way of life.