I have written several articles on postings related to politics. A list of links have been provided at bottom of this article for your convenience. This article will, however address different aspects on these political events.

I just recently became aware of the bombing that President Clinton ordered in 1998 on Iraq. After hearing about it, my mind started running wild. Did it have anything to do with the 9-11 attacks on the U.S.? I know one thing that people in the Middle East have long memories, in fact we are still dealing with the ramifications of the Crusades, and decisions made in Versailles afer WWI. So why couldn’t these attacks be in partial due to things that we have done in the Middle East? So I decided to do some research on the matter.

To start with lets discuss the 1998 bombing.

The 1998 bombing of Iraq (code-named Operation Desert Fox) was a major four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets from 16 to 19 December 1998, by the United States and the United Kingdom. On 16 December 1998, Bill Clinton announced that he had ordered strikes against Iraq. The strikes were launched as a result of Iraq’s failure to comply with United Nations Security Council resolutions and its interference with United Nations Special Commission inspectors who were looking for weapons of mass destruction. The inspectors had been sent in 1997 and were repeatedly refused access to certain sites, this used by the United States to begin military action.

The operation was a major flare-up in the Iraq disarmament crisis. The stated goal of the cruise missile and bombing attacks was to strike military and security targets in Iraq that contributed to its ability to produce, store, maintain, and deliver weapons of mass destruction. The bombing campaign had been anticipated earlier in the year and incurred criticism in the U.S. and abroad. Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates initially announced they would deny the U.S. military the use of local bases for the purpose of air strikes against Iraq.

The operation was criticized by Clinton’s detractors, accusing him of using the bombing to direct attention away from the ongoing impeachment proceedings against him.

Background

U.S. President Bill Clinton had been working under a regional security framework of dual containment, which involved punishing Saddam Hussein’s regime with military force whenever Iraq challenged the United States or the international community.

Although there was no Authorization for Use of Military Force as there was during Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom, nor was there a declaration of war as in World War II, Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act into law on 31 October 1998. The new act appropriated funds for Iraqi opposition groups in the hope of removing Saddam Hussein from power and replacing his regime with a democratic government. Despite the act’s intention of supporting opposition groups, Clinton used the act to justify the bombing.

Prior to Desert Fox, the U.S. almost led a bombing campaign against Saddam called Operation Desert Thunder. It was abandoned at the last minute when Iraq allowed the United Nations to continue weapons inspections.

Degrading WMD capabilities

Clinton administration officials said the aim of the mission was to “degrade” Iraq’s ability to manufacture and use weapons of mass destruction, not to eliminate it. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, when questioned about distinction, commented that the operation did not strive to fully eliminate Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, but instead to make their use and production more difficult and unreliable.

The main targets of the bombing included weapons research and development installations, air defense systems, weapon and supply depots, and the barracks and command headquarters of Saddam’s elite Republican Guard. Iraqi air defense batteries, unable to target the American and British jets, began to blanket the sky with near random bursts of flak fire, however the air strikes continued, and cruise missile barrages launched by naval vessels began being used in addition to bombs dropped by planes. By the fourth night most of the specified targets had been damaged or destroyed and the operation was deemed a success.

Military operations

U.S. Navy aircraft from Carrier Air Wing Three, flying from the USS Enterprise, and Patrol Squadron Four flew combat missions from the Persian Gulf in support of ODF. The operation marked the first time that women flew combat sorties as U.S. Navy strike fighter pilots and the first combat use of the United States Air Force‘s B-1B bomber. Ground units included the 31st Marine Expeditionary Unit (Special Operations Capable), of which 2nd Battalion 4th Marines served as the ground combat element. The U.S. Air Force sent several sorties of F-16s from Ahmad al-Jaber Air Base into Iraq to fly night missions in support of the operation.

On the second night of Operation Desert Fox, 12 B-52s took off from the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and launched a barrage of conventional air-launched cruise missiles (CALCMs). The other bomber wing was the 28th AEG out of Thumrait AB. The missiles successfully struck multiple Iraqi targets, including six of President Saddam Hussein’s palaces, several Republican Guard barracks, and the Ministries of Defense and Military Industry. The following evening, two more B-52 crews launched 16 more CALCMs. Over a two-night period, aircrews from the 2nd and 5th Bomb Wings launched a total of 90 CALCMs. The B-1 Lancer bomber made its combat debut by striking at Republican Guard targets. From Thumrait AB, Sultanate Oman. The 28th AEG with the B-1b aircraft from Elsworth and Dyess AFB also conducted missions. Also on 17 Dec, USAF aircraft based in Kuwait participated, as did British Royal Air Force Tornado aircraft. The British contribution totaled 15 percent of the sorties flown during Desert Fox.

By 19 December, U.S. and British aircraft had struck 97 targets, and Secretary of Defense William Cohen claimed the operation was a success. Supported by Secretary Cohen, as well as United States Central Command commander General Anthony C. Zinni and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Henry H. Shelton, President Bill Clinton declared “victory” in Operation Desert Fox. In total, the 70-hour campaign saw U.S. forces strike 85 percent of their targets, 75 percent of which were considered “highly effective” strikes. More than 600 sorties were flown by more than 300 combat and support aircraft, and 600 air-dropped munitions were employed, including 90 air-launched cruise missiles and 325 Tomahawk land attack missiles (TLAM). Operation Desert Fox inflicted serious damage to Iraq’s missile development program, although its effects on any WMD program were not clear. Nevertheless, Operation Desert Fox was the largest strike against Iraq since the early 1990s Persian Gulf War, until the commencement of Operation Iraqi Freedom. In October 2021, General Zinni gave an upbeat bomb damage assessment of the operation

97 sites were targeted in the operation with 415 cruise missiles and 600 bombs, including 11 weapons production or storage facilities, 18 security facilities for weapons, 9 military installations, 20 government CCC facilities, 32 surface-to-air missile batteries, 6 airfields, and 1 oil refinery. According to U.S. Defense Department assessments, on 20 December, 10 of these targets were destroyed, 18 severely damaged, 18 moderately damaged, 18 lightly damaged, and 23 not yet assessed. According to the Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister, the allied action resulted in 242 Iraqi military casualties, including 62 killed and 180 wounded. However, on 5 January 1999, American General Harry Shelton told the U.S. Senate that the strikes killed or wounded an estimated 1,400 members of Iraq’s Republican Guard.

Reaction

In reaction to the attack, three of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (Russia, France, and the People’s Republic of China) called for the lifting of the eight-year oil embargo on Iraq, the reorganizing or disbanding of the United Nations Special Commission, and the firing of its chairman, Australian diplomat Richard Butler.

Criticism

Accusations of an ulterior motive

Former U.S. Army intelligence analyst William Arkin claimed in his January 1999 column in The Washington Post that the operation was focused on destabilizing the Iraqi government, and that claims of WMDs were being used as an excuse.

According to Department of Defense personnel with whom Arkin spoke, CENTCOM chief Anthony Zinni stated that the U.S. only attacked biological and chemical sites that had been identified with a high degree of certainty, and that the reason for the low number of targets was because intelligence specialists could not identify weapons sites with enough specificity to comply with Zinni’s directive.

Dr. Brian Jones was the top intelligence analyst on chemical, biological and nuclear weapons at the Ministry of Defence. He told BBC Panorama in 2004 that Defence Intelligence Staff in Whitehall did not have a high degree of confidence any of the facilities bombed in Operation Desert Fox were active in producing weapons of mass destruction. The testimony given by Jones is supported by the former Deputy Chief of Defence Intelligence, John Morrison, who informed the same program that, before the operation had ended, DIS came under pressure to validate a prepared statement to be delivered by then Prime Minister Tony Blair, declaring the operation an unqualified success. Large-scale damage assessment takes time, responded Morrison, therefore his department declined to sign up to a premature statement. “After Desert Fox, I actually sent a note round to all the analysts involved congratulating them on standing firm in the face of, in some cases, individual pressure to say things that they knew weren’t true”. Later on, after careful assessment and consideration, Defence Intelligence Staff determined that the bombing had not been all that effective.

The Duelfer Report concluded in 2004 that Iraq’s WMD capability “was essentially destroyed in 1991” following the end of sanctions.

Distraction from Clinton impeachment scandal

Some critics of the Clinton administration, including Republican members of Congress, expressed concern over the timing of Operation Desert Fox.^{[16][17][page needed]} The four-day bombing campaign occurred at the same time the U.S. House of Representatives was conducting the impeachment hearing of President Clinton. Clinton was impeached by the House on 19 December, the last day of the bombing campaign. A few months earlier, similar criticism was levelled during Operation Infinite Reach, wherein missile strikes were ordered against suspected terrorist bases in Sudan and Afghanistan on 20 August. The missile strikes began three days after Clinton was called to testify before a grand jury during the Lewinsky scandal and his subsequent nationally televised address later that evening in which Clinton admitted to having an inappropriate relationship.

Criticism of the extent of the operation

Other critics, such as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, said the attacks did not go far enough, commenting that a short campaign was likely not to make a significant impact.

According to Charles Duelfer, after the bombing, the Iraqi ambassador to the UN told him, “If we had known that was all you would do, we would have ended the inspections long ago.”

9/11 and Iraq: The making of a tragedy

Twenty years after the al-Qaida attack on September 11, 2001, the United States is still involved in a war in Iraq that it started. President George W. Bush was obsessed with the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and deliberately misled the American people about who was responsible for the 9/11 attack.

I was in the White House on September 12, 2001, on the staff of the National Security Council. I recently came across my pocket diary for 2001. In it, I wrote brief notes on each day’s activity in the White House where I was senior director for the Near East. I met with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice every day and Bush almost as frequently because of the second intifada. We were constantly trying to contain the violence and prevent a wider regional conflict. In reviewing the diary I was intrigued by two notes.

On September 14, I was with Bush when he had his first phone call after 9/11 with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Bush immediately said he was planning to “hit” Iraq soon. Blair was audibly taken aback. He pressed Bush for evidence of Iraq’s connection to the 9/11 attack and to al-Qaida. Of course, there was none, which British intelligence knew.

On September 18, a week after 9/11, Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan came to the White House to see Bush. The meeting took place on the Truman Balcony. Vice President Richard Cheney and Rice were there as well. My note says the president “clearly thinks Iraq must be behind this. His questions to Bandar show his bias.” Bandar was visibly perplexed. He told Bush that the Saudis had no evidence of any collaboration between Osama bin Laden and Iraq. Indeed their history was of being antagonists.

Afterward, Bandar told me privately that the Saudis were very worried about where Bush’s obsession with Iraq was going. The Saudis were alarmed that attacking Iraq would only benefit Iran and set in motion severe destabilizing repercussions across the region. The Saudis pressed Bush to come out publicly in support of a Palestinian state as he had privately promised Crown Prince Abdullah Al Saud.

On September 28, Bush received Jordan’s King Abdullah. The king pressed the president to take action to restart Israeli-Palestinian peace talks. He argued that the Palestinian conflict was the driving force behind al-Qaida’s popularity and legitimacy. But the president was focused on Iraq.

The United States did go to war with Iraq soon enough. The Bush administration was eager to mobilize the anguish of the 9/11 attack to support the war. Despite the intelligence community’s unequivocal conclusion that Iraq had nothing to do with either 9/11 or al-Qaida, the administration let Americans believe the contrary.

Consequently, the United States went to war in Iraq on a false pretense that it was somehow avenging those killed by al-Qaida. A Washington Post poll conducted two years after 9/11 dramatically illustrated the story: 69% of Americans at the time believed Saddam Hussein was “personally” involved in the 9/11 attack. Even more staggering, 82% believed Saddam provided assistance to Osama bin Laden. Both were utterly false.

One lesson of the past 20 years is the imperative of an informed public. Sadly, we are still a long way from an enlightened public.

Causes of 9-11

The images of the Twin Towers still haunts many Americans even now.

The Twin Towers plummeting to the ground, one following the other, smoke snaking through streets, billowing for blocks, fear and confusion spreading like ashes across the country.

We know now what we didn’t know that day: that the terrorist attack had been building for more than a decade. And that it would change our country, irreparably, forever.

Here, Peter Hahn, a professor of history and dean of arts and humanities at Ohio State, discusses the causes — and lingering consequences — of 9/11.

What caused 9/11?

9/11 resulted from the confluence of multiple factors.

Islamic extremism was stirred by the Iranian Revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the assassination of the Egyptian president. That extremism turned anti-American because of U.S. support for Israel and repressive and secular Arab regimes.
 
Soaring birthrates and limited economic opportunities generated social pressures. Extremist thinking embraced violence because local regimes left no other options for peaceful, democratic reform.

The proliferation of weapons gave activists the means to inflict harm, and innovation in communications facilitated worldwide publicity about their deeds — which served the psychological warfare objective of unsettling western populations. 

How was Osama bin Laden involved?

After contesting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s, the Saudi nationalist Osama bin Laden organized a network of unconventional combatants known as Al-Qaida. Bin Laden believed that the stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War of 1990-91 violated the sacred spaces around Mecca and Medina, and in 1996, he essentially declared war on the United States.
 
From sanctuaries in Sudan and then Afghanistan, bin Laden and his allies orchestrated a series of terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 1993, an American military barracks in Saudi Arabia in 1996, the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and a U.S. Navy ship in Aden Harbor in 2000. 

Did anyone try to stop bin Laden?

Presidents Clinton and Bush deployed intelligence, law enforcement and diplomatic and military officials to foil the mounting menace of terrorism. But they failed to detect bin Laden’s most audacious plot ever, to strike New York and Washington, D.C., with highjacked civilian airliners piloted by suicide bombers.

That surprise assault on Sept. 11, 2001, destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center, badly damaged the Pentagon and left some 3,000 Americans dead. 

How did the United States respond to 9/11?

The United States reacted to the 9/11 attacks in a variety of ways.

Within several weeks of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush ordered an invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban regime, which had given Osama bin Laden sanctuary, was ousted from government, but their resistance continued to the modern day — from strongholds in the mountainous southeastern region of Afghanistan and neighboring Pakistan.

The psychological impact of 9/11 led Bush to launch an invasion of Iraq in 2003. While he initially embraced Clinton’s approach of containing Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, he shifted to belligerence out of determination to prevent any additional surprise terrorist attacks, especially given nightmare scenarios about terrorists deploying weapons of mass destruction.

What happened to bin Laden?

The United States launched a steady campaign to identify and eliminate terrorist ringleaders — many with deadly force.  Most famously, in 2011, President Barack Obama ordered a secret military mission into Pakistan that resulted in the killing of bin Laden.  

What changed in the United States after the terrorist attacks?

9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks galvanized the security consciousness of the American people.  A focus on “homeland security” led to the establishment of a White House office and, eventually, a cabinet department of that name.

Public service announcements encouraged citizens to remain vigilant, report suspicious activity and prepare for disasters. The Patriot Act of 2001 authorized enhanced domestic surveillance and law enforcement techniques previously considered excessive.

Federal authorities rounded up 1,200 men of Middle Eastern ethnicity for detention and questioning, tried terrorist suspects in military tribunals, suspended attorney-client privilege and searched business and communication records without owners’ consent or warrants. The Transportation Security Administration was created to bolster airport security.
 
As years passed without additional, spectacular attacks on the homeland, concern relaxed. Legal provisions of the Patriot Act were gradually, although not completely, rescinded.

9-11 Commission

Third public hearing of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States

Statement of Judith S. Yaphe to the
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
July 9, 2003

Saddam’s Iraq and Support for Terrorism

My testimony focuses on the role and actions of Iraq as a state sponsor of terrorism under the control of Saddam Husayn. Iraq under Saddam was a major state sponsor of international terrorism:

• Baghdad actively sponsored terrorist groups, providing safe haven, training, arms, and logistical support, requiring in exchange that the groups carry out operations ordered by Baghdad for Saddam’s objectives. Terrorist groups were not permitted to have offices, recruitment, or training facilities or freely use territory under the regime’s direct control without explicit permission from Saddam.
• Saddam used foreign terrorist groups as an instrument of foreign policy. Groups hosted by Saddam were denied protection if he wanted to improve relations with a neighboring country and encouraged to attack those Saddam wanted to pressure. If they refused Saddam’s “requests,” they were exiled from Iraq

Conventional wisdom casts Saddam Husayn as a terrorist, a primary consumer of terrorist tactics and methods, and an enemy of the United States. That is true. Conventional wisdom describes Iraq under Saddam Husayn as a primary state sponsor of international terrorism-and that is true. If the mathematics is correct, then the conventional conclusion must be that Saddam and Iraq were responsible for acts of terrorism against the United States, including the 1993 Trade Towers attack and the events of September 11, 2001. Furthermore, Saddam and al-Qaida leader Usama bin Ladin cooperated in planning and conducting attacks on these U.S. targets. These assessments are incorrect in my personal view and in my professional judgment as a scholar and intelligence analyst on Iraq, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf region for more than 20 years. Simply put, Saddam Husayn supported extremist groups that would respond to his orders and work against his enemy. This, unfortunately, does not make him the primary suspect or emince grise for al-Qaida’s attacks on the United States.

Some Undeniable Truths

Saddam’s regime first and foremost was a skilled user of terrorism to intimidate Iraqis and eliminate any opponents, real and imaginary. Saddam’s multiple security services succeeded in its internal goals and in eliminating its critics, defectors, and enemies abroad. The mukhabarat (secret police) state that was Iraq under Saddam was able to reach out to Iraqis in the Middle East, Europe, and the United States whom it wanted to silence. Some were murdered with thallium poison, others shot for the sin of opposing the regime or, equally risky, cheating the family in business deals. In January 1998, four Iraqi and four Egyptian businessmen were murdered in Amman probably by Iraqi mukhabarat agents. The Iraqis were believed to have been acting as agents for Saddam’s oldest son Uday; the Egyptians may have been innocent visitors. That same year, an Iraqi businessman in McLean, his wife and son were murdered in their home by a visitor apparently known to the family. According to press accounts, the businessman had bragged about an important new contact, Uday.

The issue today, however, is not Baghdad’s use of terrorism against its domestic opponents or business deals gone bad. It is about Saddam Husayn’s use of and support for international terrorism. One of Saddam’s first acts was to use the threat of international terrorism against Iraq to rally support to his regime. The Ba`thist regime began its long and cruel rule with the hanging of 12 Jews from the lampposts in Liberation Square, claiming that the Jews were plotting with the international Zionists and Israel against the new government. This focused the attention of many Iraqis on an external threat and away from what would be a long and bloody period of repression and terror as Saddam consolidated his power.

Iraq under Saddam supported international terrorist organizations to bolster Iraq’s revolutionary credentials, ensure his own role as Great Arab leader, and intimidate rival governments. In examining the history, methods, and patterns of behavior of Saddam Husayn in supporting international terrorism, some “truths” stand out. Beginning in the early 1970s, Saddam provided safe haven, training, arms, and other forms of assistance to Palestinian and Arab extremists. Baghdad hosted the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO), the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine (DFLP), and the Hawari faction of the PLO. In addition, Baghdad created the Arab Liberation Front (ALF) as its personal surrogate in the wars against Israel. Although the ALF conducted no terrorist operations, Saddam used it in the 1970s and resurrected it again in the current Palestinian intifada as a means to recruit Palestinians and, in 2001, to win praise for offering $25,000 to the family of each Palestinian “martyred” in an Israeli attack. Some examples of Iraqi support include:

• Abu Nidal. While enjoying safe haven in Iraq, the ANO conducted a number of terrorist attacks on Jewish and Israel targets in the 1970s and 1980s, including murders at synagogues and attacks on El Al airline passengers in Turkey, Austria, Belgium, and Italy, and the hijacking of a Pan Am airliner (Pan Am 73) in Karachi, in which 22 people (2 Americans) were murdered. ANO also attacked PLO representatives in Europe, murdered Jordanian diplomats, and attempted to assassinate Israel’s ambassador in London. (This attack became the cause celebre for Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982.) When ANO leader Sabri al-Banna refused to conduct operations against the Syrian regime ordered by Iraq, he was cast out of the country, only to later be allowed back. He died in August 2002 in Baghdad from 4 gunshot wounds to the head, a suicide according to Iraqi security officials. I assume Saddam had decided to remove evidence of his links to one of the most notorious of international terrorists at a time when the United States was increasing pressure on him to reveal his WMD programs and was accusing him of sponsoring al-Qaida.
• Abu Abbas. Palestinian terrorist Mahmud Abbas, known as Abu Abbas, and his organization, the Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), enjoyed safe haven and support in Saddam’s Iraq. Abu Abbas was responsible for the October 1985 hijacking of the Italian cruise ship Achille Lauro and the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly American confined to a wheelchair. In October 2000, following the outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, Abu Abbas announced from Baghdad that the PLF would resume attacks on Israel.
• Others: In the 1970s Saddam aided Palestinian radical factions that conducted terrorist operations on Israeli, Jewish, Western, and moderate Arab targets. In the 1980s, he sheltered the Kurdish anti-Turkish terrorist group, the Kurdish Workers Party (PKK) at the same time he allowed Ankara hot pursuit of PKK terrorists across its border. In the 1990s, he provided safe haven and supported attacks by the leftist anti-Iranian Mujahideen-e Khalq on targets inside Iran, including rocket attacks on government office buildings in Tehran.

Finally, Saddam’s mukhabarat state may have been extremely effective in cowing Iraqis and terrifying regime opponents, real and imagined. And it may have been quite effective in operations abroad against defectors and those who cheated the family of Saddam. Iraq’s security services and surrogates showed little success, however, in planning or ordering operations against foreign targets. Baghdad ordered its Palestinian dependents to launch terrorist operations against the United States and its coalition partners in the fall and winter of 1990; they refused to comply. Iraq made an apparently singular effort to send terrorist teams abroad prior to the initiation of hostilities with the U.S.-led coalition in 1991; it failed. One of the Intelligence Community’s reported successes in the period of Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm was the arrest of the teams on landing outside Iraq. They were caught by their fake passports, all of which were in consecutive sequence. The attempt to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in Kuwait in April 1993 was a botched job, using apparently ill-trained operatives in an ill-planned operation.

Could there have been an al-Qaida connection?

Did Iraq need Usama and al-Qaida? Saddam sought to destroy any international groups-be they religious or ethnic based-that he perceived would attack him because of their linkages to domestic Iraqi factions. Iraq ruthlessly suppressed elements of its Shia community, nearly 60 percent of the population, who were known or suspected of belonging to, harboring members, or merely sympathetic with the aims groups such as the Iraqi Islamic Amal, the Islamic Dawa Party, and the Iranian-based Supreme Council for the Islamic Republic in Iraq (SCIRI). As noted above, Saddam was willing to aid the Syrian-based Sunni Islamic Muslim Brotherhood organization as a tool to attack Hafiz al-Asad, but he would not permit an Iraqi chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood to thrive. Saddam may have posed as a devout Muslim to win the support of Iraq’s Shia but he was at heart a secular Arab nationalist whose only loyalty was to himself and the state.

In my judgment, Saddam assessed Usama bin Ladin and al-Qaida as a threat rather than a potential partner to be exploited to attack the United States. Bin Ladin wanted to attack Iraq after it occupied Kuwait in 1990 rather than have the Saudi government depend on foreign military forces. Several captured al-Qaida operatives have said Usama refused to consider working for or with Saddam, according to press accounts. Saddam would have understood that after Usama had realized his ambition to remove U.S. forces from Arabia and eliminate the Al Sa`ud and other ruling families in the Gulf, that he would have been the next target. The threat would have appeared particularly risky to Saddam, given the modest indicators of a revival in personal piety and Islamist dress among Iraqi Sunnis in the last decade. He certainly suspected Saudi Arabia of encouraging Wahhabi pietism and practices among Iraq’s Sunni Arabs and Bin Ladin’s loyalists would have been suspect of similar anti-regime activities.

Did Usama and al-Qaida need Iraq? The theory that terrorist groups do not need state sponsors seems valid. It is, in my view, evident from the information unveiled in the international investigations into al-Qaida’s networks and support structures. The groups were-and are-global in scope and compartmented in design, membership, organizational infrastructure, and operational planning. Many of the leaders are well-educated and trained in Western universities. The need-to-know principle is not one restricted to the Intelligence Community. It was certainly the hallmark of Soviet-sponsored clandestine groups and of the Muslim Brotherhood when it first emerged in Egypt in 1928. The MB, by the way, had no state sponsor yet was able to conduct some highly effective operations inside Egypt, including the assassination of a Prime Minister.

Some Questionable Assumptions

I find troubling the use of circumstantial evidence and the corresponding lack of credible evidence to jump to extraordinary conclusions on Iraqi support for al-Qaida. By credible, I mean reporting from sources with some record of credibility, from open sources or intelligence community clandestine sources; evidence of the signature of an attack to a known group, something tangible linking doer to deed to sponsor. I worked in CIA’s Counter Terrorist Center for 3 years and am all too painfully aware that information on terrorism does not come from librarians or patriots or other untarnished sources. It comes from people who do it themselves, who have an agenda or a grudge, or who enjoy watching fires put out. I am also only too painfully aware of the risk we run in having intelligence collectors-the agencies that comprise the Intelligence Community-working against each other rather than with each other. Moreover, guilt by circumstance should trouble anyone in a society based on the rule of law, even if the perpetrators operate on a different set of ideological assumptions or none at all. Finally, just because a person or an agency or a government does not agree with one’s assumptions, does not necessarily mean they are mistaken, stupid, or deliberately obstructive.

So, what is so credible and/or circumstantial in the evidence alleging Saddam Husayn supported, coordinated, or controlled Usama bin Ladin, al-Qaida, and the terrorists who attacked the United States on September 11?

• Ramzi Yousef, the Trade Towers and alleged control by Baghdad. Yousef was convicted for his involvement in the 1993 Trade Towers attack. The story of false identities and tampered documents belonging to a Pakistani and filched from occupied Kuwait is intriguing and rivals anything John Le Carre has written. Should we make the assumption that only Iraqi intelligence could have tampered with the files and planned far in advance to create a “legend” for an operative? Granted, Iraqi intelligence officers and operatives were trained by East German, Czech, and Soviet counterparts. To repeat a point made earlier, except for assassination hits against their own dissidents and defectors abroad, Iraq’s intelligence services did not show exceptional talent or success in long-range, long-time operational planning.
• Muslim extremists are not capable of carrying out complicated plots or producing material that could be used in a biological or chemical attack or act of sabotage. This argument claims the anthrax attacks could only have been carried out by al-Qaida operatives who received the materiel, targeting information, and directions from a state sponsor, Iraq. I disagree. Many of al-Qaida‘s affiliate groups, as in other extremist groups in the Middle East, are led by men with advanced degrees from Western schools in science and technology.
• Only a devoutly religious Muslim would work for or with an Islamist terrorist group like al-Qaida. I don’t know if Ramzi Youssef was an Islamic fundamentalist or not. It doesn’t matter if he was willing to work for al-Qaida or, at least, take their shilling. I believe we know from press accounts tracing the last days of the 9/11 operatives that they were told to go to bars, womanize, drink, and do what was necessary to maintain their cover-they would still be received in Paradise.
• Saddam and Usama could not possibly have worked together because of the differences in religious sect or the secular versus religious nature of their beliefs. They could have. Terrorist groups and state sponsors have cooperated tactically even though they have sectarian or doctrinal differences. After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Iran’s Islamist extremists sought to export their revolution by legitimate and illegitimate means. They tried to appeal to Sunni extremist factions, for example offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, while encouraging Hizballah groups among the Shias of Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and the smaller Arab states of the Persian Gulf. Iran’s clerical extremists based their appeal on similarities and ignored differences in faith and practices. In this sense, Sunni extremists and Shia militants both shared a vision of living in an Islamic state under shariah (religious law); they would have removed their illegitimate and unrepentant Muslim rulers and the foreigners-read the U.S.-who kept them in power. In a similar vein, Saddam was willing to back Sunni extremists against his rival for Arab and Ba`thist leadership-Hafiz al-Asad. What made Saddam’s cooperation with Usama bin Ladin unlikely, in my mind, was Saddam’s certain knowledge that he would be a target of Usama’s once the Al Sa`ud were removed and Usama’s deep hostility to Saddam.
• Saddam and Bin Ladin worked together and Iraqi intelligence “ran” the al-Qaida networks. Evidence includes meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and al-Qaida operatives in Sudan, the Czech Republic, and Afghanistan. In the 1980s and 1990s every international terrorist group and state sponsor was represented in Sudan. Iraq, Iran, and most Islamist organizations were welcomed by Hassan al-Turabi, the Islamist leader of the military-dominated regime. How could they not meet in Khartoum, a small city offering many opportunities for terrorist t�te-�-t�tes. Czech and American intelligence officials say they are unable to confirm any meeting between al-Qaida operative Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer, identified as Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani. I would be disappointed if an Iraqi intelligence officer did not meet with al-Qaida operatives. He would have been derelict in his duty if he did not at least try to arrange a meeting. His purpose would have been to assess intent, operational capability, and recruitment potential. It would not have been sufficient for both simply to hate the U.S. Saddam always demanded total loyalty from and control over any group he supported. The evidence is fairly clear, at least in my mind, that al-Qaida would not be subordinated to any government, even if Usama had admired Saddam, which he did not. Finally, it is claimed that a senior Iraqi intelligence operative, Farouk Hijazi, who served as head of the Iraqi intelligence service as well as ambassador to Turkey, Jordan, and Tunisia, met with Usama in Afghanistan.

If these alleged facts are true, we should be able to confirm them-we have al-Ani and Hijazi in custody. If a terrorist calls Iraq, does that prove state complicity? If a terrorist meets with an Iraqi intelligence officer, does that make him a tool of the Iraqis? If a terrorist receives money from the UAE, does that make the UAE complicit? I think not on all counts.

Recommendations

Given the examination of the role of intelligence in supporting Administration actions or intent to act, a few recommendations come to mind:

• Recognize the limits as well as the strengths of intelligence. It is more art than science, despite the state-of-the-art technology, the ability to hear and see what no one has heard or seen before. In terrorism, as in other intelligence issues, HUMINT is needed to flesh out methods and intent. Fancy technical means of collection are not as reliable as one might think-they, too, need to pass the test of reliability and intent used to validate HUMINT.
• Always check reliability statements and do not blindly accept what is not vetted or what seems implausible. Learn how to read an intelligence report, be it a report directly from a clandestine source, one filtered by the CIA, or produced by the collected wisdom of the Intelligence Community (known as estimates). These are, in my experience, the most difficult to write, the most complicated to coordinate, and probably the least satisfactory to read in their tendency to go for the lowest common denominator. That is an analyst’s profession and sometimes they get it right.
• Intelligence does not make policy and policy should not shape intelligence.

A Short and Selective Chronology of Reports and Events

Regarding Saddam, al-Qaida, and U.S. Targeting

First efforts: Iraq’s efforts to encourage Palestinian terrorist factions and to send Iraqi terrorist teams abroad to attack American targets fail. The Palestinians refuse to act, and the Iraqi agents are arrested on landing. In April 1993, an Iraqi attempt to assassinate former President George H.W. Bush in Kuwait fails. Both efforts reflect sloppy tradecraft by the Iraqis.

The Prague Connection. Much of the evidence of Iraqi links to al-Qaida is based on meetings alleged to have occurred in Khartoum, Prague and Kandahar between Iraqi intelligence agents and al-Qaida operatives. Czech President Vaclav Havel denied there was any evidence to confirm reports that Mohammed Atta, a leader of the 9/11 attacks, had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, in Prague in April, 2001, five months before the attacks. American records indicate Atta was in Virginia Beach in early April 2001, and DCI George Tenet told Congress in testimony after 9/11 that the CIA could find no evidence to confirm that the Prague meeting took place. (James Risen, “Prague Discounts an Iraqi Meeting,” The New York Times, 21 October 2002). Al-Ani was subsequently ordered to leave the Czech Republic after he was caught taking photos of the Radio Free Europe Building in Prague. Iraq recalled its Ambassador to Turkey, Farouk Yahya al-Hijazi on 30 November 2001 following allegations he had been in contact with Mohammed Atta and other members of al-Qaida. According to press reports, Usama bin Ladin was “believed to have met repeatedly with officers of Iraq’s Special Security Organization . . . and seems to have ties to Iraq’s Mukhabarat.” Hijazi allegedly traveled to Afghanistan in December 1998 and, according to a 1999 report in the Guardian (UK) Saddam was “thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq.” (Richard Miniter, “The Visible Hand: The Iraq Connection President Bush must win the war his father started,” The Wall Street Journal Online, 24 September 2001.) An Israeli specialist on terrorism cites an Italian press article that Hijazi met bin Ladin in Sudan as early as 1994. European security officials claimed in March 2001, however, that Saddam personally decided against allowing Usama bin Ladin and al-Qaida to use Iraq as a base because he feared they might destabilize his regime. See David Ignatius, “Dubious Iraqi Link,” The Washington Post, 15 March 2001, p. A23.

Training Camps. Two defectors, one of whom claimed to be a senior mukhabarat officer, alleged they had worked at an Iraqi camp south of Baghdad called Salman Pak, where Islamist terrorists had been trained since 1995. The training included, in particular, hijacking techniques useful in seizing aircraft like the American-made Boeing model in use there. How did the defectors know these were Islamists? The defectors said the men prayed and had beards, obviously marking them as Islamists in Saddam’s secular Iraq. The information on the Islamists was provided by the Iraqi National Congress (INC) and was not confirmed by other sources. The existence of a terrorist training camp at Salman Pak has been long known, but the aircraft used for training was an old Soviet Antonov and not a Boeing 707, as the INC sources claimed. See Chris Hedges, “Defectors Cite Iraqi Training for Terrorism,” The New York Times, 8 November 2001.

Saddam, al-Qaida, and Ansar al-Islam: An American diplomat in Jordan, Lawrence Foley, is murdered in front of his house in Amman on 28 October 2002. Al-Qaida leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, who directed the murder, is a Jordanian of Palestinian origin who allegedly was in Baghdad in spring 2002 recovering from wounds received in the fighting in Afghanistan. According to press citing government sources, no evidence links Iraq to Foley’s killing or Zarqawi. Zarqawi may have been linked to Ansar al-Islam, a small group of approximately 150 Arabs trained in al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and living in an area of Iraq controlled by the Kurds, and not Baghdad. Ansar al-Islam members had fled Afghanistan after the U.S. military campaign and taken refuge in northern Iraq. According to press sources, the CIA believes that the last anti-American operation planned by Iraq was the April 1993 Bush assassination attempt in Kuwait. See Dana Priest, “U.S. Not Claiming Iraqi Link to Terror,” The New York Times, 10 September 2001, p. A1; James Risen and David Johnston, “Split at C.I.A. and F.B.I. on Iraqi Ties to Al Qaeda,” The New York Times, 2 February 2003.

Al Qaeda in Iraq: Assessment and Outside Links

In explaining the decision to invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein from power, the Administration asserted, among other justifications, that the regime of Saddam Hussein had a working relationship with the Al Qaeda organization. The Administration assessed that the relationship dated to the early 1990s, and was based on a common interest in confronting the United States. The Administration assertions were derived from U.S. intelligence showing a pattern of contacts with Al Qaeda when its key founder, Osama bin Laden, was based in Sudan in the early to mid-1990s and continuing after he relocated to Afghanistan in 1996.

Critics maintain that subsequent research demonstrates that the relationship, if it existed, was not “operational,” and that no hard data has come to light indicating the two entities conducted any joint terrorist attacks. Some major hallmarks of an operational relationship were absent, and several experts outside and within the U.S. government believe that contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda were sporadic, unclear, or subject to alternate explanations.

Another pillar of the Administration argument, which has applications for the current U.S. effort to stabilize Iraq, rested on reports of contacts between Baghdad and an Islamist Al Qaeda affiliate group, called Ansar al-Islam, based in northern Iraq in the late 1990s. Although the connections between Ansar al-Islam and Saddam Hussein’s regime were subject to debate, the organization evolved into what is now known as Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQ-I). AQ-I has been a numerically small but operationally major component of the Sunni Arab-led insurgency that frustrated U.S. efforts to stabilize Iraq. Since mid-2007, in part facilitated by combat conducted by additional U.S. forces sent to Iraq as part of a “troop surge,” the U.S. military has exploited differences between AQ-I and Iraqi Sunni political, tribal, and insurgent leaders to virtually expel AQ-I from many of its sanctuaries particularly in Baghdad and in Anbar Province. U.S. officials assess AQ-I to be weakened almost to the point of outright defeat in Iraq, although they say it remains lethal and has the potential to revive in Iraq. Attacks continue, primarily in north-central Iraq, that bear the hallmarks of AQ-I tactics, and U.S. and Iraqi forces continue to conduct offensives targeting suspected AQ-I leaders and hideouts.

As of mid-2008, there are indications that AQ-I leaders are relocating from Iraq to join Al Qaeda leaders believed to be in remote areas of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border. That perception, if accurate, could suggest that AQ-I now perceives Afghanistan as more fertile ground than is Iraq to attack U.S. forces. The relocation of AQ-I leaders to Pakistan could also accelerate the perceived strengthening of the central Al Qaeda organization.

Al Qaeda in Iraq: Assessment and Outside Links

Part of the debate over the Bush Administration decision to use military action to overthrow the regime of Saddam Hussein centers on whether or not that regime was allied with Al Qaeda. In building an argument that the United States needed to oust Saddam Hussein militarily, the Administration asserted that Iraq constituted a gathering threat to the United States because it continued to develop weapons of mass destruction (WMD) that it could potentially transfer to international terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda, with which Iraq was allied. This combination produced the possibility of a catastrophic attack on the United States, according to the Administration.

The first pillar of the Administration argument for ousting Saddam Hussein—its continued active development of WMD—has been researched extensively. After the fall of the regime in April 2003, U.S. forces and intelligence officers in an “Iraq Survey Group” (ISG) searched Iraq for evidence of WMD stockpiles. A “comprehensive” September 2004 report of the Survey Group, known as the “Duelfer report,” said that the ISG found no WMD stockpiles or production but said that there was evidence that the regime retained the intention to reconstitute WMD programs in the future. The formal U.S.-led WMD search ended December 2004, although U.S. forces have found some chemical weapons caches left over from the Iran-Iraq war. The UNMOVIC work remained formally active until U.N. Security Council Resolution 1762 terminated it on June 29, 2007.

The second pillar of the Administration argument—that Saddam Hussein’s regime had links to Al Qaeda—is relevant not only to assess justification for the invasion decision but also because an Al Qaeda affiliate (Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQ-I) became a key component of the post-Saddam insurgency among Sunni Arabs in Iraq. The Administration has maintained that the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq, fighting alongside Iraqi insurgents from the ousted ruling Baath Party, members of former regime security forces, and other disaffected Iraqi Sunni Arabs, demonstrates that there were pre-war linkages. On the other hand, most experts believe that Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters entered Sunni-inhabited central Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein, from the Kurdish controlled north and from other Middle Eastern countries. These foreign fighters are motivated by an anti-U.S. ideology and a target of opportunity provided by the presence of U.S. forces there, rather than longstanding ties to the former Iraqi regime, according to this view.

Background on Saddam – Al Qaeda Links

On March 17, 2003, in a speech announcing a 48-hour deadline for Saddam Hussein and his sons to leave Iraq in order to avoid war, President Bush said:

…the [Iraqi] regime has a history of reckless aggression in the Middle East. It has a deep hatred of America and our friends. And it has aided, trained, and harbored terrorists, including operatives of Al Qaeda.”

The Administration argument for an Iraq-Al Qaeda linkage had a few major themes: (1) that there were contacts between Iraqi intelligence and Al Qaeda in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan dating from the early 1990s, including Iraq’s assistance to Al Qaeda in deployment of chemical weapons; (2) that an Islamist faction called Ansar al-Islam (The Partisans of Islam) in northern Iraq, had ties to Iraq’s regime; and (3) that Iraq might have been involved in the September 11, 2001 plot itself. Of these themes, the September 11 allegations are the most widely disputed by outside experts and by some officials within the Administration itself. Some Administration officials, including President Bush, have virtually ruled out Iraqi involvement in the September 11 attacks while others, including Vice President Cheney, have maintained that the issue is still open.

Secretary of State Powell presented the Administration view in greater public detail than any other official when he briefed the United Nations Security Council on Iraq on February 5, 2003, although most of that presentation was devoted to Iraq’s alleged violations of U.N. requirements that it dismantle its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) programs. According to the presentation:

Iraq and terrorism go back decades…. But what I want to bring to your attention today is the potentially more sinister nexus between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, a nexus that combines classic terrorist organizations and modern methods of murder. Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants. Going back to the early and mid-1990s, when bin Laden was based in Sudan, an Al Qaeda source tells us that Saddam and bin Laden reached an understanding that Al Qaeda would no longer support activities against Baghdad…. We know members of both organizations met repeatedly and have met at least eight times at very senior levels since the early 1990s…. Iraqis continued to visit bin Laden in his new home in Afghanistan [after bin Laden moved there in mid-1996]…. From the late 1990s until 2001, the Iraqi embassy in Pakistan played the role of liaison to the Al Qaeda organization … Ambition and hatred are enough to bring Iraq and Al Qaeda together, enough so Al Qaeda could learn how to build more sophisticated bombs and learn how to forge documents, and enough so that Al Qaeda could turn to Iraq for help in acquiring expertise on weapons of mass destruction.

Secretary Powell did not include in his February 5, 2003, briefing the assertion that Iraq was involved in the September 11 plot. Some analysts suggest the omission indicates a lack of consensus within the Administration on the strength of that evidence. In a January 2004 press interview, Secretary Powell said that his U.N. briefing had been meticulously prepared and reviewed, saying “Anything that we did not feel was solid and multi-sourced, we did not use in that speech.” Additional details of the Administration’s argument, as well as criticisms, are discussed below.

Post-Saddam analysis of the issue has tended to refute the Administration argument on Saddam-Al Qaeda linkages, although this issue is still debated. The report of the 9/11 Commission found no evidence of a “collaborative operational linkage” between Iraq and Al Qaeda. In his book “At the Center of the Storm” in May 2007 (Harper Collins Press, pp. 341-358), former CIA Director George Tenet indicated that the CIA view was that contacts between Saddam’s regime and Al Qaeda were likely for the purpose of taking the measure of each other or take advantage of each other, rather than collaborating. Others note, however, that some of Tenet’s pre-war testimony before Congress was in line with the prevailing Administration view on this question, contrasting with the views in his book. In March 2008, a study by the Institute for Defense Analyses, written for the U.S. Joint Forces Command, and based on 600,000 documents captured in post-Saddam Iraq, found that Iraq during the early to mid-1990s actively supported Egyptian Islamic Jihad, which in 1998 formally merged with Al Qaeda, but that the documents do not reveal “direct coordination and assistance between Saddam Hussein’s regime and Al Qaeda.”

Major Themes in the Administration Argument

Some of the intelligence information that the Bush Administration relied on to judge linkages between Iraq and Al Qaeda was publicized not only in Secretary of State Powell’s February 5, 2003, briefing to the U.N. Security Council, but also, and in more detail, in an article in The Weekly Standard. Vice President Cheney has been quoted as saying the article represents the “best source of [open] information” on the issue. The article contains excerpts from a memorandum, dated October 27, 2003, from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith to Senators Pat Roberts and Jay Rockefeller, the then chairman and vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The memorandum reportedly was based on research and analysis of intelligence and other information by the “Office of Special Plans,” an Iraq policy planning unit within the Department of Defense set up in early 2002 but disbanded in the fall of 2002. The following sections analyze details of the major themes in the Administration argument.

Links in Sudan, Afghanistan, and Pakistan

The “DOD memorandum,” as well as other accounts, include assertions that Iraqi intelligence developed a relationship with Al Qaeda in the early 1990s, brokered by the Islamist leaders of Sudan. At the time, Osama bin Laden was in Sudan. He remained there until Sudan expelled him in mid-1996, after which he went to Afghanistan. According to the purported memo, the Iraq-Al Qaeda relationship included an agreement by Al Qaeda not to seek to undermine Saddam’s regime, and for Iraq to provide Al Qaeda with conventional weapons and WMD. The Administration view is that Iraq was highly isolated in the Arab world in the early 1990s, just after its invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, and that it might have sought a relationship with Al Qaeda as a means of gaining leverage over the United States and a common enemy, the regime of Saudi Arabia. From this perspective, the relationship served the interests of both, even though Saddam was a secular leader while Al Qaeda sought to replace regional secular leaders with Islamic states.

The purported DOD memorandum includes names and approximate dates on which Iraqi intelligence officers visited bin Laden’s camp outside Khartoum and discussions of cooperation in manufacturing explosive devices. It reportedly discusses subsequent meetings between Iraqi intelligence officers and bin Laden and his aides in Afghanistan and Pakistan, continuing until at least the late 1990s. The memorandum cites intelligence reports that Al Qaeda operatives were instructed to travel to Iraq to obtain training in the making and deployment of chemical weapons. Secretary of State Powell, in his February 5, 2003, U.N. briefing, citing an Al Qaeda operative captured in Afghanistan, stated that Iraq had received Al Qaeda operatives “several times between 1997 and 2000 for help in acquiring poison gases.”

According to press accounts, some Administration evaluations of the available intelligence, including a reported draft national intelligence estimate (NIE) circulated in October 2002, interpreted the information as inconclusive, and as evidence of sporadic but not necessarily ongoing or high-level contacts between Iraq and Al Qaeda. Some CIA experts reportedly asserted that the ideological differences between Iraq and Al Qaeda were too large to be bridged permanently. For example, bin Laden reportedly sought to raise an Islamic army to fight to expel Iraqi troops from Kuwait following the Iraqi invasion in August 1990, suggesting that bin Laden might have viewed Iraq as an enemy rather than an ally. According to some accounts, the Saudi royal family rebuffed bin Laden’s idea as unworkable, deciding instead to invite in U.S. forces to combat the Iraqi invasion. The rebuff prompted an open split between bin Laden and the Saudi leadership, and bin Laden left the Kingdom for Sudan in 1991. Ideological differences between Iraq and Al Qaeda were evident in a February 12, 2003, bin Laden statement referring to Saddam Hussein’s regime—dominated by his secular Arab nationalist Baath Party—as “socialist and infidel,” although the statement also gave some support to the Administration argument when bin Laden exhorted the Iraqi people to resist impending U.S. military action.

As noted above, Iraq had an embassy in Pakistan that the Administration asserts was its link to the Taliban regime of Afghanistan. However, skeptics of a Saddam-Al Qaeda link note that Iraq did not recognize the Taliban as the legitimate government of Afghanistan when the Taliban was in power during 1996-2001. It was during the period of Taliban rule that Al Qaeda enjoyed safehaven in Afghanistan. Of the 12 Al Qaeda leaders identified by the U.S. government in 2003 as either “executive leaders” or “senior planners and coordinators,” none was an Iraqi national. This suggests that the Iraqi nationals did not have the sanction of Saddam Hussein to join Al Qaeda when he was in power. An alternate explanation is that very few Iraqis had the opportunity to join Al Qaeda during its key formative years – the years of the anti-Soviet “jihad” in Afghanistan (1979-1989). Young Iraqis who might have been attracted to volunteer in Afghanistan were serving in Iraqi units during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, and were not available to participate in regional causes.

Ansar al-Islam Presence in Northern Iraq

Another major theme in the Administration assertions was the presence in Iraq of a group called Ansar al-Islam (Partisans of Islam). This aspect of the Administration’s argument factored prominently in Secretary of State Powell’s U.N. presentation, and is the most directly relevant to analysis of the Al Qaeda presence in Iraq today. Ansar al-Islam is considered the forerunner of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQ-I).

Ansar al-Islam formed in 1998 as a breakaway faction of Islamist Kurds, splitting off from a group, the Islamic Movement of Iraqi Kurdistan (IMIK). Both Ansar and the IMIK were initially composed almost exclusively of Kurds. U.S. concerns about Ansar grew following the U.S. defeat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan in late 2001, when some Al Qaeda activists, mostly Arabs, fled to Iraq and associated there with the Ansar movement. At the peak, about 600 Arab fighters lived in the Ansar al-Islam enclave, near the town of Khurmal. Ansar fighters clashed with Kurdish fighters from the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK), one of the two mainstream Iraqi Kurdish parties, around Halabja in December 2002. Ansar gunmen were allegedly responsible for an assassination attempt against PUK “prime minister” of the Kurdish region Barham Salih (now a deputy Prime Minister of Iraq) in April 2002.

The leader of the Arab contingent within Ansar al-Islam was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an Arab of Jordanian origin who reputedly fought in Afghanistan. Although more recent assessments indicate Zarqawi commanded Arab volunteers in Afghanistan separate from those recruited by bin Laden, Zarqawi was linked to purported Al Qaeda plots in the 1990s and early 2000s. He allegedly was behind foiled bombings in Jordan during the December 1999 millennium celebration, to the assassination in Jordan of U.S. diplomat Lawrence Foley (2002), and to reported attempts in 2002 to spread chemical agents in Russia, Western Europe, and the United States.

In explaining why the United States needed to confront Saddam Hussein’s regime militarily, U.S. officials maintained that Baghdad was connected to Ansar al-Islam. In his U.N. presentation, Secretary of State Powell said:

Iraq today harbors a deadly terrorist network headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an associate and collaborator of Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda lieutenants…. Baghdad has an agent in the most senior levels of the radical organization, Ansar al-Islam, that controls this corner of Iraq…. Zarqawi’s activities are not confined to this small corner of northeastern Iraq. He traveled to Baghdad in May 2002 for medical treatment, staying in the capital for two months while he recuperated to fight another day. During this stay, nearly two dozen extremists converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there…. From his terrorist network in Iraq, Zarqawi can direct his network in the Middle East and beyond.

However, some accounts question the extent of links, if any, between Baghdad and Ansar al-Islam. Baghdad did not control northern Iraq even before Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), and it is questionable whether Zarqawi, were he tied closely to Saddam Hussein’s regime, would have located his group in territory controlled by Saddam’s Kurdish opponents. The Administration view on this point is that Saddam saw Ansar as a means of pressuring Saddam Hussein’s Kurdish opponents in northern Iraq.

The September 11, 2001, Plot

The reputed DOD memorandum reportedly includes allegations of contacts between lead September 11 hijacker Mohammad Atta and Iraq intelligence, including as many as four meetings between Atta and Iraq’s intelligence chief in Prague, Ahmad Samir al-Ani. The DOD memo says that al-Ani agreed to provide Atta with funds at one of the meetings. The memo asserts that the CIA confirmed two Atta visits to Prague—October 26, 1999, and April 9, 2001—but did not confirm that he met with Iraqi intelligence during those visits. The DOD memo reportedly also contains reports indicating that Iraqi intelligence officers attended or facilitated meetings with Al Qaeda operatives in southeast Asia (Kuala Lumpur) in early 2000. In the course of these meetings, the Al Qaeda activists were said to be planning the October 12, 2000, attack on the U.S.S. Cole docked in Aden, Yemen, and possibly the September 11 plot as well.

As noted above, Secretary of State Powell reportedly considered the information too uncertain to include in his February 5, 2003, briefing on Iraq to the U.N. Security Council. President Bush did not mention this allegation in his January 29, 2003, State of the Union message, delivered one week before the Powell presentation to the U.N. Security Council. President Bush said on September 16, 2003, that there was no evidence Saddam Hussein’s regime was involved in the September 11 plot; he made the statement in response to a journalist’s question about statements a few days earlier by Vice President Cheney suggesting that the issue of Iraq’s complicity in September 11 is still open.

There is dispute within Czech intelligence that provided the information on the meetings, that the Iraq-Atta discussions took place at all, particularly the April 2001 meeting. In November 2001, Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross said that Atta and al-Ani had met, but Czech Prime Minister Milos Zeman subsequently told U.S. officials that the two had discussed an attack aimed at silencing anti-Saddam broadcasts from Prague. Since 1998, Prague has been the headquarters of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, a U.S.-funded radio service that was highly critical of Saddam Hussein’s regime. In December 2001, Czech President Vaclav Havel said that there was a “70% chance” the meeting took place. The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) eventually concluded, based on records of Atta’s movements within the United States in April 2001, that the meeting probably did not take place and that there was no hard evidence of Iraqi regime involvement in the September 11 attacks. Some press reports say the FBI is more confident than is the CIA in the judgment that the April 2001 meeting did not occur. Al Ani himself, captured by U.S. forces in 2003, reportedly denied to U.S. interrogators that the meeting ever happened.

Al Qaeda and the Iraq Insurgency

Whether or not Al Qaeda leaders and Saddam Hussein had a relationship, a major issue facing the United States is the degree to which Al Qaeda elements are threatening the U.S. effort to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. Commenting on the Iraq insurgency in its early stages, President Bush said in a speech on September 8, 2003, that “We have carried the fight to the enemy…. We are rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization, not on the fringes of its influence but at the heart of its power.” In his January 20, 2004, State of the Union message, President Bush said, “These killers [Iraq insurgents], joined by foreign terrorists, are a serious, continuing danger.” Similar statements followed in subsequent years as the Administration sought to assert that Iraq had become the “central front” in the broader post-September 11 “war on terrorism,” and that it is preferable to combat Al Qaeda in Iraq rather than allow it to congregate elsewhere in the region and hatch plots inside the United States itself. In a January 10, 2007, major speech announcing the U.S. “troop surge,” President Bush made similar points:

… we will continue to pursue al Qaeda and foreign fighters. Al Qaeda is still active in Iraq. Its home base is Anbar Province. Al Qaeda has helped make Anbar the most violent area of Iraq outside the capital. A captured al Qaeda document describes the terrorists’ plan to infiltrate and seize control of the province. This would bring al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq’s democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

In a July 24, 2007, speech specifically on the issue,  President Bush said:

… Our troops are….opposing ruthless enemies, and no enemy is more ruthless in Iraq than al Qaeda. They send suicide bombers into crowded markets; they behead innocent captives and they murder American troops. They want to bring down Iraq’s democracy so they can use that nation as a terrorist safe haven for attacks against our country….

Critics of this view maintain that Al Qaeda or pro-Al Qaeda elements were motivated by the U.S. invasion to enter Iraq to fight the United States there. According to this argument, the U.S. presence in Iraq has generated new Al Qaeda followers—both inside and outside Iraq—who might not have become active against the United States had the war against Iraq not occurred. This view draws some support from the unclassified “key judgments” of a July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that said:

…we assess that [Al Qaeda central leadership’s] association with AQ-I helps Al Qaeda to energize the broader Sunni extremist community, raise resources, and to recruit and indoctrinate operatives, including for homeland attacks.

Other critics maintain that the Administration has emphasized an “Al Qaeda” component of the insurgency as a means of bolstering U.S. public support for the war effort in Iraq. According to this view, the Administration has repeatedly attempted to link in the public consciousness the Iraq war to the September 11 attacks in part because of consistent public support for a military component of the overall war on terrorism.

AQ-I Strategy and Role in the Insurgency

In analyzing the debate over Al Qaeda involvement in Iraq, a major question is the degree to which AQ-I has driven the insurgency against U.S. forces and the government of Iraq. Few dispute that there has been, from almost the inception of the insurgency in mid-2003, a “foreign fighter” component. In November 2003, early in the insurgency, one senior U.S. commander in Iraq (82^nd Airborne Division commander Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack) said, in response to reports that foreign fighters were key to the insurgency: “I want to underscore that most of the attacks on our forces are by former regime loyalists and other Iraqis, not foreign forces.” At that time, other commanders emphasized the foreign fighter role in the insurgency by asserting that the high profile suicide bombings that occurred were having a significant impact in undermining U.S. and international confidence in the U.S. ability to stabilize post-Saddam Iraq. As examples of such attacks that caused doubt in the U.S. ability to stabilize Iraq, commanders cited the August 19, 2003 bombing of U.N. headquarters in Baghdad and the August 29, 2003, bombing of a major mosque complex in Najaf that killed the leader of the large Shiite faction Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, Mohammad Baqr Al Hakim. (The group renamed itself in June 2007 as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, ISCI).

As a result, the United States has consistently focused on combatting Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, his foreign fighter network in Iraq, and his successors. On March 15, 2004, his Ansar al-Islam group was named as “Foreign Terrorist Organization” under the Immigration and Nationality Act. On October 15, 2004, the State Department named the “Monotheism and Jihad Group”—the successor to Ansar al-Islam—as an FTO. The designation said that the Monotheism group “was…responsible for the U.N. headquarters bombing in Baghdad.” Later that month, perhaps in response to that designation, Zarqawi changed the name of his organization to “Al Qaeda Jihad Organization in the Land of Two Rivers (Mesopotamia – Iraq)—commonly known now as Al Qaeda in Iraq, or AQ-I. The FTO designation was applied to the new name.

Along with the designations came stepped up U.S. military efforts to find and capture or kill Zarqawi. There were several reported “near misses,” according to press reports. However, on June 7, 2006, U.S. forces were able to track Zarqawi to a safe house in Hibhib, near the city of Baqubah, in the mixed Sunni-Shiite province of Diyala, and an airstrike by one U.S. F-16 mortally wounded him.

A related group is Ansar al-Sunna, an offshoot of the Zarqawi network that was operating in northern Iraq, including the Kurdish areas and areas of Arab Iraq around Mosul. It was named as an FTO as an alias of Ansar al-Islam when the latter group was designated in March 2004, and Ansar al-Sunna remains on the FTO list. Ansar al-Sunna changed its name back to Ansar al-Islam in November 2007; however, the group has always maintained some distance from AQ-I. For example, it did not join the AQ-I umbrella group called the “Islamic State of Iraq.”

In its most significant attack, the group claimed responsibility for February 1, 2004, twin suicide attacks in Irbil, northern Iraq, which killed over 100 Kurds, including some senior Kurdish officials. Another major attack—attributed to Ansar al-Sunna by the State Department “Country Reports on Terrorism: 2006” (released April 2007 by the State Department Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism)—was the December 2004 suicide bombing of a U.S. military dining facility at Camp Marez in the northern city of Mosul, which killed 13 U.S. soldiers. The State Department terrorism report for 2007 said that Ansar al-Sunna/Islam “continues to conduct attacks against a wide range of targets including Coalition Forces, the Iraqi government and security forces, and Kurdish and Shia figures.”

AQ-I Strategy

Before his death, Zarqawi had largely set AQ-I’s strategy as an effort to provoke all out civil war between the newly dominant Shiite Arabs and the formerly pre-eminent Sunni Arabs. In this strategy, Zarqawi apparently calculated that provoking civil war could, at the very least, undermine Shiite efforts to consolidate their political control of post-Saddam Iraq. If fully successful, the strategy could compel U.S. forces to leave Iraq by undermining U.S. public support for the war effort, and thereby leaving the Shiite government vulnerable to continued AQ-I and Sunni insurgent attack. The strategy might have been controversial among Al Qaeda circles, as evidenced by a purported letter (if genuine) from the number two Al Qaeda leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, to Zarqawi, in July 2005. In that letter, Zawahiri questioned Zarqawi’s strategy in Iraq by arguing that committing violence against Shiite civilians and religious establishments would undermine the support of the Iraqi people for AQ-I and the Sunni “resistance” more broadly.

To implement its strategy, AQ-I under Zarqawi focused primarily on spectacular suicide bombings intended to cause mass Shiite casualties or to destroy sites sacred to Shiites. Several suicide bombings were conducted in 2005 against Shiite celebrations, causing mass casualties. The most significant attack the February 22, 2006, bombing of the Shiite “Golden Mosque” in Sunni-inhabited Samarra (Salahuddin Province), widely attributed to AQ-I. The attack largely destroyed the golden dome of the mosque. It touched off widespread Shiite reprisals against Sunnis nationwide and is widely considered to have started the “civil war” that raged from the time of the bombing until late 2007, when it began to abate. On several occasions, President Bush has said that Zarqawi largely succeeded in his strategy, although he and other senior Administration officials did not, even at the height of the violence in late 2006, characterize the Iraq as in a state of “civil war.” AQ-I’s most lethal attack, and the single deadliest attack of the war to date, was the August 2007 truck bombings of Yazidi villages near Sinjar, in northern Iraq, killing an estimated 500 persons, mostly Yazidis.

By the end of 2006 and in early 2007, most senior U.S. officials were identifying AQ-I as a driving force, or even the driving force, of the insurgency. In his “threat assessment” testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee on February 27, 2007, Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency Gen. Michael Maples called AQ-I “the largest and most active of the Iraq-based terrorist groups.” On April 26, 2007, at a press briefing, the overall U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, called AQ-I “probably public enemy number one” in Iraq. On July 12, 2007, US. military spokesman in Iraq, Brig. Gen. Kevin Bergner, said that AQ-I was responsible for 80 to 90% of the suicide bombings in Iraq, and that defeating it was a main focus of U.S. operations. Some U.S. commanders said that, while most foreign fighters going to Iraq become suicide bombers, others are contributing to the overall insurgency as snipers, logisticians, and financiers. However, other U.S. commanders noted—and continue to note—that these major bombings constituted a small percentage of overall attacks in Iraq (which in early 2007 numbered about 175 per day), and that most of the U.S. combat deaths came from roadside bombs and direct or indirect munitions fire likely wielded by Iraqi Sunni insurgent fighters.

2007 Iraqi Sunni “Awakening” Movement/U.S. Operations and “Troop Surge”

In January 2007, President Bush articulated a new counter-insurgency strategy developed by Gen. Petraeus and others, based on assessments within the Administration and outside, that U.S. policy was failing to produce stability. The deterioration in the previous U.S. strategy was attributed, in part, to the burgeoning sectarian violence that AQ-I had helped set off. The cornerstone of the new strategy was to increase the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad and in Anbar Province in order to be able to protect the civilian population rather than conduct combat operations against militants. The U.S. “troop surge” reached full strength in June 2007.

The U.S. troop surge was intended to try to take advantage of a growing rift within the broad insurgency that was being observed by U.S. commanders in Iraq as early as mid-2005. The Zarqawi strategy of attempting to provoke civil war, and some of its ideology and practices in the Sunni areas, were not universally popular among Iraq’s Sunnis, even among some Sunni insurgent groups. Strategically, Iraqi Sunnis have discernible political goals in Iraq, and some AQ-I tactics, such as attacks on Shiite civilians, were perceived as preventing future power sharing compromise with the Shiites. AQ-I fighters have broader goals, such as defeating the United States and establishing a Sunni-led Islamic state in Iraq that could expand throughout the region. Iraqi Sunni insurgents believed that attacks should be confined to “combatant” targets—Iraqi government forces, most of which are Shiite, Iraqi government representatives, and U.S. and other coalition forces.

Other Iraqi Sunnis resented AQ-I practices in the regions where AQ-I fighters congregated, including reported enforcement of strict Islamic law, segregation by sex, forcing males to wear beards, and banning all alcohol sales and consumption. In some cases, according to a variety of press reports, AQ-I fighters killed Iraqi Sunnis who violated these strictures. Other Sunnis, particularly tribal leaders involved in trade and commerce, believed that the constant fighting provoked by AQ-I was depriving Iraqi Sunnis of their livelihoods. Others believe that the strains between AQ-I and Iraqi Sunni insurgent fighters were a competition for power and control over the insurgency. According to this view, Iraqi Sunni leaders no more wanted to be dominated by foreign Sunnis than they did by Iraqi Shiites or U.S. soldiers. During 2003-2006 these strains were mostly muted as Iraqi Sunnis cooperated with AQ-I toward the broader goal of overturning the Shiite-dominated, U.S.-backed power structure in Iraq.

The first evidence of strains between AQ-I and Iraqi Sunni insurgents emerged in May 2005 in the form of a reported battle between AQ-I fighters and Iraqi Sunni tribal militiamen in the western town of Husaybah. Still, U.S. commanders had not, at this point, articulated or developed a successful strategy to exploit this rift. Meanwhile, Zarqawi was attempting to counter the strains developing between AQ-I and Iraqi Sunni political and insurgent structures. In January 2006, AQ-I announced formation of the “Mujahidin Shura Council”—an umbrella organization of six groups including AQ-I and five Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups, mostly those with an Islamist ideology. Forming the Shura Council appeared to many to be an attempt by AQ-I to demonstrate that it was working cooperatively with its Iraqi Sunni hosts and not seeking their subordination. To further this impression, in April 2006, the Council announced that an Iraqi, Abdullah Rashid (aka Abu Umar) al-Baghdadi, had been appointed its leader, although there were doubts as to Baghdadi’s true identity. (In July 2007, a captured AQ-I operative said Baghdadi does not exist at all, but was a propaganda tool to disguise AQ-I’s large role in the insurgency.) Iraqi Sunni insurgent groups dominated by ex-Baath Party and ex-Saddam era military members apparently did not join the Mujahidin Shura. AQ-I continued to operate under the Mujahidin Shura umbrella at least until Zarqawi’s death.

The shift to increased integration with Iraqi Sunni insurgents continued after Zarqawi’s demise. After his death, Abu Ayub al-Masri (an Egyptian, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajir) was formally named leader of the Mujahidin Shura Council (and therefore leader of AQ-I). According to the State Department terrorism report for 2006, al-Masri “continued [Zarqawi’s] strategy of targeting Coalition forces and Shi’a civilians in an attempt to foment sectarian strife.” In October 2006, al-Masri declared the “Islamic State of Iraq” (ISI) organization under which AQ-I and its allied groups now claim their attacks. ISI appeared to be a replacement for the Mujahidin Shura Council. In April 2007, the ISI named a “cabinet” consisting of a minister of war (al-Masri), the head of the cabinet (al-Baghdadi), and seven other “ministers.”

The “Awakening” Movement Against AQ-I

The AQ-I efforts to improve cooperation with the Iraqi insurgents did not satisfy the entire Sunni community, even though that community remained resentful of the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and its perceived monopoly on power. In August 2006, U.S. commanders began to receive overtures from Iraqi Sunni tribal and other community leaders in Anbar Province to cooperate with U.S. efforts to expel AQ-I and secure the cities and towns of the province. This became known as the “Awakening” (As Sahawa). In September 2006, 23 Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar, led by a tribal sub-leader named Abd al-Sattar Al Rishawi, formed an “Anbar Salvation Council.” The Council initially recruited about 13,000 young Sunnis from the province to help secure Ramadi, Fallujah, and other Anbar cities. The Council survived the September 13, 2007 killing of Rishawi by a suicide bomber believed to belong to AQ-I. Rishawi’s brother (Shaykh Ahmad al-Rishawi) later took over the group and, along with the governor (Mamoun Rashid al-Awani) and other tribal figures from Anbar, visited Washington D.C. in November 2007 and in June 2008 to discuss the security progress in their province.

The U.S. “troop surge” included the addition of 4,000 U.S. Marines in Anbar Province. This additional force apparently emboldened the Anbar Salvation Council to continue recruiting Sunni volunteers to secure the province and purportedly convinced Anbar residents to increase their cooperation with U.S. forces to prevent violence. U.S. commanders emboldened this cooperation by offering funds ($350 per month per fighter) and training, although no U.S. weapons, to locally recruited Sunni security forces. These volunteers are now referred to as “Sons of Iraq” – there are about 103,000, of which about 80% are Sunnis. The 20% who are Shiites are opposed to Shiite extremist groups such as that of Moqtada Al Sadr. To retain the loyalty of the Sons of Iraq, U.S. officials are trying to fold them into the official Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), which would then pay their salaries. However, the Shiite-dominated Maliki government fears that the Sunni fighters are trying to burrow into the ISF with the intent of regaining power in Iraq, and have only agreed to accept about 35,000 Sons of Iraq fighters onto the ISF payrolls, not all of which are Sunni. U.S. commanders say that this hesitation by the Maliki government risks driving the Sunnis back into insurgent ranks and back into cooperation with AQ-I. Some Sons of Iraq have already abandoned their positions out of frustration, particularly in Diyala Province, although they have not necessarily resumed insurgent activity.

By June 2007, at the height of the U.S. troop surge, Gen. Petraeus called security improvements in Anbar “breathtaking” and said that security incidents in the province had declined by about 90%. He and other commanders reported an ability to walk incident free, although with security, in downtown Ramadi, a city that had been a major battleground only months earlier and which U.S. military intelligence experts reportedly had given up as “lost” in late 2006. General Petraeus testified in April 2008 that he estimates that Anbar Province could be turned over to Provincial Iraqi Control by July 2008, although the handover has been delayed by a power struggle between the Awakening tribal figures and the more urban, established Iraqi Sunni parties such as the Iraqi Islamic Party (IIP).

The positive trends observed in Anbar encouraged other anti-AQ-I Sunnis to join the Awakening movement. In May 2007, a Diyala Salvation Council was formed in Diyala Province of tribal leaders who wanted to stabilize that restive province. In early 2007, Amiriyah was highly violent, but was stabilized by the emergence of former Sunni insurgents now cooperating with U.S. forces as a force called the “Amiriyah Freedom Fighters.” Other Baghdad neighborhoods, including Saddam stronghold Adhamiyah, began to undergo similar transformations. In Baghdad, the U.S. military established supported this trend in the course of the Baghdad Security Plan (“troop surge”) by establishing about 100 combat outposts, including 33 “Joint Security Stations” in partnership with the ISF, to clear neighborhoods of AQ-I and to encourage the population to come forward with information about AQ-I hideouts. Prime Minister Maliki said on February 16, 2008 that AQ-I had been largely driven out of Baghdad, and assessment that has not been subsequently contradicted by U.S. officials.

Gen. Petraeus attempted to increase the momentum of the Awakening Movement and the Sons of Iraq program with extensive U.S.-led combat against AQ-I and its sanctuaries. The large scale operations included those related to the troop surge in Baghdad, and two other large operations—Phantom Thunder and Phantom Strike. Operation Phantom Thunder (June 2007), was intended to clear AQ-I sanctuaries in the “belts” of towns and villages within a 30 mile radius around Baghdad. Part of the operation reportedly involved surrounded Baquba, the capital city of Diyala Province, to prevent the escape of AQ-I from the U.S. clearing operations in the city. A related offensive, Operation Phantom Strike, was conducted in August 2007 to prevent AQ-I from establishing any new sanctuaries.To maintain pressure on AQ-I, in January 2008, the U.S. military conducted Operation Iron Harvest and Operation Iron Reaper to disrupt AQ-I in northern Iraq.

Current Status of AQ-I

General Petraeus appeared before four Committees of Congress during April 8-9, 2008 to discuss progress in Iraq. He testified that the assistance from the Sons of Iraq, coupled with “relentless pursuit” of AQ-I by U.S. forces, had “reduced substantially” the threat posed by AQ-I. On May 10, 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden said Al Qaeda is on “the verge of a strategic defeat in Iraq” because of its reduced presence and activity in large parts of Iraq. On August 10, 2008, Gen. James Conway, Commandant of the Marine Corps, told journalists that AQ-I had permanently lost its foothold in large parts of Iraq, that it is no longer welcomed by Sunni populations in Iraq, and theat AQ-I fighters had begun to shift their focus to Afghanistan where their efforts against the United States might be more effective. In late July 2008, a reputed AQ-I leader in Anbar told the Washington Post that AQ-I leader Abu Ayyub al-Masri had left Iraq to go to Afghanistan, or to the border areas of Pakistan where Al Qaeda leaders are believed to be hiding.

On the other hand, General Petraeus testified and has said in other settings that AQ-I remains highly active in and around Mosul, and views Mosul as key to its survival in Iraq, because it is astride the entry routes from Syria. He testified that AQ-I is “still capable of lethal attacks” and that the United States must “maintain relentless pressure on the organization, on the networks outside Iraq that support it, and on the resource flows that sustain it.” He also testified that Al Qaeda’s senior leaders …”still view Iraq as the central front in their global strategy” and “send funding, direction, and foreign fighters to Iraq.” On August 12, 2008, the U.S. National Intelligence Officer for Transnational Threats, Ted Gistaro, in prepared remarks, told a Washington, D.C. research institute (Washington Institute for Near East Policy) that

Despite setbacks in Iraq, AQ-I remains Al Qaeda’s most prominent and lethal regional affiliate. While Al Qaeda leaders likely see the declining effectiveness of AQ-I as a vulnerability to their global recruiting and fundraising efforts, they likely continue to see the fight in Iraq as important to their battle with the United States. [Osama] bin Laden and [Al Qaeda deputy leader Ayman ] al-Zawahiri since late 2007 have issued eight statements to rally supporters, donors, and prospective fighters by publicly portraying the Iraq jihad as part of a wider regional cause to “liberate” Jerusalem.

Estimated Numbers of Foreign Fighters

Although there have been differences among commanders about the contribution of the foreign fighters to the overall violence in Iraq, estimates of the numbers of foreign fighters have remained fairly consistent over time, at least as a percentage of the overall insurgency. As early as October 2003, U.S. officials estimated that as many as 3,000 might be non-Iraqi, although, suggesting uncertainty in the estimate, Gen. Abizaid said on January 29, 2004, that the number of foreign fighters in Iraq was “low” and “in the hundreds.” A September 2005 study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that there were about 3,000 non-Iraqi fighters in Iraq – about 10% of the estimated total size of the insurgency. The State Department report on terrorism for 2007 (Country Reports on Terrorism: 2007, released April 30, 2008) says AQ-I has a “membership” estimated at 5,000 – 10,000, making it the largest Sunni extremist group in Iraq. This estimate is somewhat higher than what many experts might expect in light of the official U.S. command assessments of the weakening of AQ-I by U.S. operations and strategy.

Another issue is the rate of flow of foreign fighters into Iraq. U.S. commanders said in July 2007 that approximately 60-80 foreign fighters come across the border every month (primarily the Iraq-Syria border) to participate in the Iraq insurgency. Press reports say that U.S. commanders estimate that the flow slowed to about 40 in October 2007, in part because of a U.S. raid in September 2007 on a desert camp at Sinjar, need the Syrian border, that was the hub of operations to smuggle foreign fighters into Iraq. General Petraeus testified in April 2008 that about 50 – 70 foreign fighters were still coming across the Syrian border into Iraq, and that Syria “has taken some steps to reduce the flow of foreign fighters through its territory, but not enough to shut down the key network that supports AQ-I.” In June and July 2008, U.S. commanders estimate the flow at about 20-30 fighters per month.

Another issue is the specific nationalities of the foreigners. One press report in July 2007, quoting U.S. officials in Iraq, said that about 40% of the foreign fighters in Iraq are of Saudi origin. The November 22, 2007 New York Times article, cited above, says that Saudi Arabia and Libya accounted for 60% of the 700 foreign fighters who came into Iraq over the past year. That article was consistent with the findings of a study produced by the Combating Terrorism Center of West Point (Al Qa’ida’s Foreign Fighters in Iraq), based on records of 700 foreign nationals who had entered Iraq, and whose papers were found in Iraq by U.S.-led forces near Sinjar, along the border with Syria, published in February 2008. The Sinjar records indicated that, of the 595 records in which a country of origin was stated, about 245 were of Saudi origin; about 110 were of Libyan origin; about 48 were of Syrian origin; 47 were of Yemeni origin; 45 were of Algerian origin; about 40 were of Moroccan origin and a similar amount were of Tunisian origin; about 20 were or Jordanian origin; about 8 were of Egyptian origin; and 20 were “other.”

Linkages to Al Qaeda Central Leadership

If the reports of significant AQ-I relocations to the Pakistan tribal areas bordering Afghanistan are correct, this would suggest that the links are tightening between AQ-I and Al Qaeda’s central leadership as represented by Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. Both Al Qaeda leaders are widely believed to be hiding in areas of Pakistan near the border with Afghanistan, and many assessments since 2007 say that Al Qaeda is enjoying increasing freedom of movement and action in the border regions. If Al Qaeda’s ranks are now augmented by an influx of AQ-I fighters from the Iraq battlefront, it could be argued that Al Qaeda’s overall capabilities to attack the U.S. homeland, or to undermine U.S. efforts to stabilize Afghanistan, have been increased. U.S. commanders in Afghanistan say they are seeing growing signs of Al Qaeda involvement in the insurgency in Afghanistan, beyond financing and logistical facilitation, although it is not certain whether any of this added assistance to the Afghan insurgency is coming from fighters recently relocated from Iraq. The issue of how the United States is combatting the Afghan insurgency, both in Afghanistan and increasingly through direct action on the Pakistani side of the border, is discussed in CRS Report RL30588, Afghanistan: Post-War Governance, Security, and U.S. Policy, by [author name scrubbed]. On the other hand, as noted above, the fact that AQ-I fighters and leaders are leaving Iraq represents a blow to Al Qaeda and could weaken its ability to recruit new adherents.

The links between AQ-I and Al Qaeda’s central leadership might be tightening, but they are not new. As discussed above, on July 24, 2007, President Bush devoted much of a speech to the argument that AQ-I is closely related to Al Qaeda’s central leadership. The President noted the following details, including:

• In 2004, Zarqawi formally joined Al Qaeda and pledged allegiance to bin Laden. Bin Laden then publicly declared that Zarqawi was the “Prince of Al Qaeda in Iraq.” President Bush stated that, according to U.S. intelligence, Zarqawi had met both bin Laden and Zawahiri. He asserted later in the speech that, according to U.S. intelligence, AQ-I is a “full member of the Al Qaeda terrorist network.”
• After Zarqawi’s death, bin Laden sent an aide named Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi to help Zarqawi’s successor, al-Masri, but al-Iraqi was captured before reaching Iraq.
• That a captured AQ-I leader, an Iraqi named Khalid al-Mashhadani, had told U.S. authorities that Baghdadi was fictitious. In July 2007, Brig. Gen. Bergner, a U.S. military spokesman, told journalists that Mashhadani is an intermediary between al-Masri and bin Laden and Zawahiri.
• That AQ-I is the only insurgent group in Iraq “with stated ambitions to make the country a base for attacks outside Iraq.” Referring to the November 9, 2005, terrorist attacks on hotels in Zarqawi’s native Jordan, President Bush said AQ-I “dispatched terrorists who bombed a wedding reception in Jordan.” Referring to an August 2005 incident, he said AQ-I “sent operatives to Jordan where they attempted to launch a rocket attack on U.S. Navy ships” docked at the port of Aqaba.

Some experts believe that links between Al Qaeda’s central leadership and AQ-I have been tenuous, and that the few operatives linking the two do not demonstrate an ongoing, substantial relationship. Others point to the Zawahiri admonishment of Zarqawi, discussed above, as evidence that there is not a close connection between the two. Still others have maintained that there is little evidence that AQ-I seeks to attack broadly outside Iraq, and that those incidents that have taken place have been in Jordan, where Zarqawi might have wanted to try to undermine King Abdullah II, whom Zarqawi opposed as too close to the United States. Since the 2005 attacks noted above, there have not been any attacks outside Iraq that can be directly attributed to AQ-I.

Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.

1. Iraq’s government openly praised the September 11th attacks on AmericaIn the aftermath of the attacks on America that killed thousands of innocents from 80 countries, Saddam Hussein said, “America is reaping the thorns planted by its rulers in the world.”

2. Iraq shelters and supports terrorist organizationsIraq shelters and supports terrorist organizations that direct violence against Iran, Israel, and Western governments.Al Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.In 1993, Iraq attempted to assassinate the Emir of Kuwait and a former U.S. President.

3. Saddam Hussein has an appetite for nuclear weaponsIn 1995, after four years of deception, Iraq finally admitted it had a crash nuclear weapons program prior to the Gulf War.Were it not for that war, the regime in Iraq would likely have possessed a nuclear weapon no later than 1993.Iraq still employs capable nuclear scientists and technicians and retains physical infrastructure needed to build a nuclear weapon.Iraq has made several attempts to buy high-strength aluminum tubes used to enrich uranium for a nuclear weapon.

4. Saddam likely possesses biological and chemical weaponsUnited Nations’ inspections revealed that Iraq likely maintains stockpiles of VX, mustard and other chemical agents, and that the regime is rebuilding and expanding facilities capable of producing chemical weapons.On at least 10 occasions, Saddam Hussein’s military forces have attacked Iranian and Kurdish targets with combinations of mustard gas and nerve agents through the use of aerial bombs, 122-millimeter rockets, and conventional artillery shells.Iraq has admitted to producing tens of thousands of liters of anthrax and other deadly biological agents for use with Scud warheads, aerial bombs, and aircraft spray tanks.U.N. inspectors believe Iraq has produced two to four times the amount of biological agents it declared, and has failed to account for more than three metric tons of material that could be used to produce biological weapons.Iraq is expanding and improving facilities that were used for the production of biological weapons.

5. Saddam’s repression of the Iraqi peopleIn the late 1980’s Saddam Hussein launched a large-scale chemical weapons attack against Iraq’s Kurdish population killing thousands.Former UN Human Rights Special Rapporteur Max Van der Stoel’s report in April 1998 stated that Iraq had executed at least 1,500 people during the previous year for political reasons.Tens of thousands of political opponents and ordinary citizens have been subjected to arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, summary execution, and torture by beating and burning, electric shock, starvation, mutilation, and rape.Wives are tortured in front of their husbands, children in the presence of their parents.Saddam blames the suffering of Iraq’s people on the U.N., even as he uses his oil wealth to build lavish palaces for himself, and buy arms for his country.

6. Saddam’s Abuse of ChildrenChild labor persists and there are instances of forced labor.There are widespread reports that food and medicine that could have been made available to the general public, including children, have been stockpiled in warehouses or diverted for the personal use of some government officials.Saddam has held military training camps for children between 10 and 15 years of age.

7. Violence against womenHuman rights organizations and opposition groups received reports of women who suffered from severe psychological trauma after being raped by Iraqi personnel while in custody.Amnesty International reported that, in October 2000, the Iraqi Government executed dozens of women accused of prostitution.

8. Iraq has not returned prisonersIn 1991, the U.N. Security Council demanded that Iraq return all prisoners from Kuwait and other lands. Iraq’s regime agreed. It broke its promise.Last year the Secretary General’s high-level coordinator for this issue reported that Kuwait, Saudi, Indian, Syrian, Lebanese, Iranian, Egyptian, Bahraini, and Omani nationals remain unaccounted for — more than 600 people.One American pilot is among them.

9. Saddam possesses prohibited missilesIraq possesses a force of Scud-type missiles with ranges beyond the 150 kilometers permitted by the U.N.Work at testing and production facilities shows that Iraq is building more long-range missiles that it can use to inflict mass death throughout the region.

10. Weapons inspectors have been shut out of Iraq for four yearsIt’s been almost four years since the last U.N. inspectors set foot in Iraq, four years for the Iraqi regime to plan, build, and test behind the cloak of secrecy.The first time we may be completely certain Saddam Hussein has a nuclear weapon is when, God forbids, he uses one.

A Decade of Deception and Defiance

Conclusion

While there is some anecdotal evidence to support my hypothesis, there is no actual concrete evidence. The problem is that everything is very cloudy. It has been shown conclusively that our government lied to us about weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s actual participation in 9-11, so whether or not al Qaeda decided to act on Iraq’s behalf is still unclear. I usually try not to put my personal opinion in these articles, but in this case I feel compelled to do so. Radical Islam, which has direct ties to al Qaeda has a great deal of hate towards the United States. So I don’t think that it is a far stretch for them to take any excuse to attack us, so why not our bombing of Iraq in 1998, an attack that was totally unjustified.

Resources

en.wikipedia.org, “1998 bombing of Iraq.” By Wikipedia Editors; brookings.edu, “9/11 and Iraq: The making of a tragedy.” By Bruce Riedel; osu.edu, “9/11: causes and lingering consequences: Ohio State’s Peter Hahn takes a close look at the causes and legacy of the 9/11 attacks.” By Cara Reed; “http://govinfo.library.unt.edu/, “9-11 Commission.”; everycrsreport.com, “Al Qaeda in Iraq: Assessment and Outside Links.”; georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov, “Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.”; https://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/, “A Decade of Deception and Defiance.”; https://sgadaria.expressions.syr.edu, “Shaping Public Opinion: The 9/11-Iraq Connection in the Bush Administration’s Rhetoric.” By Amy Gershkoff and Shana Kushner;

Appendix

Our Goals For The Gulf War II

1. Taking out Sadam Hussein
2. Finding and getting rid of Iray’s supposed weapons of mass destruction
3. Looking for and getting rid of terrorists in the country
4. gathering intelligence to destroy global terrorist networks
5. Gathering intelligence to find weapons of mass destruction around the world
6. Ending sanctions and getting humanitarian support in Iraqi citizens presumably hurt under Hussein’s control
7. Securing Iraqi’s oil fields
8. Helping the Iraqi people transition to a representative democracy

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