An Impertinent Question
deanesmay
Did you ever think that Saddam was behind 9/11?
I've never met anyone who thought this. So I'm curious.
Bonus question: Do you know anyone--anyone at all--who ever thought that Saddam was behind 9/11?
I've never met anyone who thought this. So I'm curious.
Bonus question: Do you know anyone--anyone at all--who ever thought that Saddam was behind 9/11?
Pissed me off to no end at the time...
Did Saddam and Osama sit down with a map and timetables? 99.999999999% not.
Did some of Saddam and Osama's minions sit down with a map and timetables? 50-50. Ask me again in two years when we've had a reasonable chance to go through Saddam's files and threaten some of the head minions with the death penalty.
Did some of Saddam's minions, with Saddam's approval, provide Iraqi government money, supplies, and technical help (forged docs, etc.) to Osama's minions? 75% probable... which means I wouldn't take it to court, but I'd have no problem fighting a war.
Did Saddam and his minions look the other way while Osama's minions moved thru Iraq recruiting, raising money, and training? Yes, and we seem to have the evidence for that.
Did Saddam and his minions support terror against America by whoever wanted to do it? Oh, absofragginlutely! And my response is, "Mess with the bull and get the horn!"
While I am 95% sure that Al Qaeda pulled it off on its own, my immediate instinct after 9-11 was that Iraq could be involved (especially considering the murky ties to the first WTC bombing), and truth be told we STILL don't know 100% that Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11. I don't think they did, but i also won't be surprised if history discovers a greater collaborative relationship between AQ and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Your logic on this one is pretty specious. You tend to associate with fairly smart people, and in any event, your acquaintances make up a very small portion of the nation's total demographics. I would venture a guess that if you ventured into parts of the country and social circles with which you are currently unfamiliar, you'd get a very different picture of people's beliefs. In any case, "I haven't heard about it firsthand, so it must not be true," is an appallingly unsound argument. I expect better from you, Dean.
I will point out that pretty much everyone who held that belief was an uncritical thinker who got their news from network television.
Can you please back up this horseshit with some quotes, links or other evidence?
I hear this all of the time, yet I can find no difference between any Bush quotes and the quotes of Dems prior to and AFTER Sept. 11.
Back it up. Or stop spreading the fertilizer.
My husband on the other hand, thought of Saddam as a suspsect - at the time - and still says he wouldn't be surprised if evidence was uncovered that he was involved.
However, I have always thought that Saddam would have been all too willing to sell his WMD or WMD technology to whoever was interested - especially Arabs. I believed this prior to 9/11 - and still do.
Interestingly, we have a radio co-host here in NYC who is a radical left-wing attorney (Ron Koubie(sp) who defended the head of the 1993 bombing crew (name escapes me presently). Mr. Koubie said that this particular case was one that he was happy to lose.
I do think that the roots of terrorism that now threaten us are complex, and involve elements cited below.
1) The Arab national cultural outlook is based in part on traditions of pride in conquest of large parts of the ancient world in the 7th and 8th centuries. In their culture, these conquests are seen as a matter of the Arab national birthright, in which challenges by any other cultures to reclaim parts of these lands is seen as an offense against the Arab nation as a whole.
For example, the reconquest by the Spanish christians of lands forcefully taken from them by the Arab muslims early in the 8th century is still seen by certain Arab groups as an event that they hope to overturn. Ultimate control of Sicily, which was in Arab hands during the 9th and 10th centuries, is probably another long-term goal of the Arabs.
For the reasons stated above, it is doubtful that the Arab nation as a whole shall ever make peace with the Jewish nation in general or the zionists in particular. It is doubtful that they care about Jews living in any part of the middle east per se, but they will only accept them in what to the Arabs is the traditional djimmi (inferior) status, dominated, semi-protected and therefore despised, by the Arabs.
The very idea of Jews conquering them at all is probably like a knife in their collective stomachs, continually twisted and turned by the forces of some inexplicable devil. Sort of like what members of the Waffen SS must have felt like in World War II when purely slavic Russians beat the crap out of them in battle after battle on the eastern front, not infrequently in cases where the numeric odds favored the Germans. The nazi youth too had been indoctrinated to imagine themselves members of a master race.
It may not occur to them that they can be beaten at all, except by what they consider unfair means, and they consider jews, christians and other non-Arab cultures as
2) The presence of foreigners in dominant positions in Arab countries, either as soldiers or as suppliers of vital services, probably would be rankling to all cultures. But resistance has reached a feverish pitch in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and other Arab states. There really is no answer for this. Only a fool ventures into a place where he might be taken hostage and die screaming in agony on a filthy floor as his head is sawed off not too carefully by a pack of grinning, hooded murderers.
3) Islam, the national religion of the Arabs, and sharia, the combination of religious and civil law that enforces and reinforces the control of islam in all Arab countries and more or less in all other islamic countries as well, reinforces the permanently imperial notions of the Arab culture. In other words, resistance to islam on the part of any peoples whose own lands adjoin islamic societies, as in the Phillipine islands, Pakistan, Israel, and even parts of the Balkan peninsula, is seen as an offense against both god and man.
4) The Arab and islamic hatred of west has been fanned up by a growing understanding that the culture of the west may well be the greatest threat both to arabism and islam since the onset of the Mongol invasions of the early 13th century. The culture of the west — based on its premises of equal rights for all people and for members of both sexes, threated the very core of arabism and islam, neither of which have ever experienced the type of fundamental reformation that broke the stranglehold of papal control of Europes in the 16th-17th centuries, and the perestroika and glasnost that broke up the communist empire in less than 10 years, late in the 20th century. Such a reformation is long overdue for the Arabs and for islam, and we in the west may have no peace with them — or at best, a series of temporary truces of brief endurance — unless and until such a reformation takes place.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Incidentally, my father doesn't think Hussein was behind September 11th, either -- but he's persuaded that the Bush administration tried to portray Hussein thus as having been behind September 11th, and he's said that that's one of the main reasons that he won't vote for Bush.
Amy: I imagine the argument for such a position (and it seems quite reasonable, actually) is that a large part of what emboldened the Islamists to attack the US was the lack of a strong (enough) response to attacks on and conflicts with the US. While most of us see the result of the Gulf War as the result of compromise politics with the Arab Bloc, the Islamists seem to see it as a sign of American weakness and decadence. (By their worldview, a strong power would never have stopped short of total victory. Compromise is a sign of weakness, and diplomacy is only useful to buy time to re-arm (and thus shows comparative, if possibly temporary, weakness.))
Thus it seems quite plausible that a total US victory in the Gulf War, such that Hussein was deposed and imprisoned or killed, would have acted as a deterrent to Islamist attacks (just like a strong response to the first WTC bombing would have, and not running from Somalia after the "defeat" (militarily a victory, just like Tet, but politically a defeat) in Mogadishu). What we see as "using judicial means" or "prudent retreat from a quagmire" looks to the Islamists like weakness and decadence, which encourages attacks.
Not an analysis everyone will agree with, but not illogical or unintelligible, either.
re: "I thought it was same crowd that did the 1993 bombing?"
There's a highly plausible theory that says that iraq had a hand in that.
We do know, because he proudly announced it, that Hussein was paying a bounty to the surviving families of those homicide bombers, with a larger payment if an American was killed along with the Izzies.
I don't know anyone who is positive that Hussein had an active role in the planning, financing or other support in 9/11. I also don't know anyone who would faint with surprise if such evidence turned up.
On Saddam's end, any aid given to al Qaeda would be limited in scope and quantity to avoid detection by security and intelligence services of other nations. The last thing Saddam would want is to be tied to a successful terrorist plot against the U.S. that would invite action against him. But if he ever wants to gain freedom of action, the U.S. would have to be forced out or scared into giving up containment. If al Qaeda's attacks had the desired response, the U.S. would retreat from the Middle East with its tail tucked between it's legs. Saddam would be the biggest beneficiary.
As for the notion that removal of Saddam during the first gulf war would have allowed us to avoid 9/11, there is merit to that idea depending on whether you think OBL legitimately was pissed off for the reasons stated in his manifesto or whether those were just excuses used to justify his xenophobic, bigotted hatred of the U.S. If his complaints regarding troops in Saudi Arabia, sanctions against Iraq, and other containment operations are not merely excuses to attack the the U.S., then taking out Saddam in 1991 and not placing ourselves in a position where we have to actively contain Iraq through a variety of obtrusive means would have substantially reduced the terror risk. Containment of Iraq was an irritant to many Arabs, and was used as justification for jihad and a tool for recruiting jihadis. So one could easily make the claim that not taking out but rather containing Saddam has a causal relationship with 9/11.
Also with regards to the notion that Saddam wouldn't have any thing to do with a religiously based terrorist group, one should remember that Saddam supported the terror strikes against Isreal carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The Ba'athist government in Damascus also supports them. Arabs are not any less likely to disagree with the notion that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. The line dividing Saddam and OBL is far narrower than that dividing us from either of them.
As for the bonus question...no. Can't say as I do. Of course, some of the people I know may have initially believed such but do not believe so any longer.
On 9/11 itself, I was pretty sure it was Saddam. I didn't know a soul who'd ever heard of Osama bin Laden and everyone I talked to that day was pretty sure it was Saddam. We were told by the Admininistration fairly quickly (I don't recall exactly - 24-48 hours) that it was "some terrorist in Afghanistan that hangs out with those Taliban freaks that tore down the statues of Buddha" (my words as I recall them). I took this at face value and stopped thinking it was Saddam.
Since that time, I've pretty much been of a mind agreeing with Stephen that it's increasingly a "connection" thing not an "involvement" thing. But I have to tell you, the more that people make the kinds of elitist statements like you do here, the more it drives me to be a contrarian just to drive you nuts. So many people are tripping over themselves to say the guy never did anything.
He had weapons of mass destruction, threatened his neighbors with them, and used them against his own people. This isn't in dispute by anyone but the looniest moonbats. Now, because huge stockpiles have not been found, they never even existed. The idea that they were spirited away is blown off and the notion that "stockpiles" might never have existed and "haven't been found" has crept into the language of even the most partisan conservatives. I'm sorry, but they DID exist. "Stockpiles" of all Saddam's bio and chem weapons, capable of killing millions, could probably fit into two tanker trucks. We're not talking huge volumes here. For me, the question will never be anything but, "WHERE did they go?"
Similarly, the more people try to tell me there was no connection to 9/11, the more I'm inclined to think there HAS to be more of a connection than anyone wants to admit - including the Administration, which can't fight everywhere immediately, and may be holding information back to prevent demands by hawks like me that we act immediately everywhere. For example, do you think Iraqi Intelligence was training terrorists to get jobs as stewardesses at Salman Pak? I don't think so.
The funniest thing I hear is people quoting the CIA or the NSA as a source of intelligence known by the public. "The CIA admits..." they say. You've got to be kidding me. It's the CIA for God's sake, not the Boy Scouts. If they admit to something, your first instinct should to presume it's a lie, until proven otherwise (and even then to question it). I'm stunned that anyone believes anything they say. And note, I'm not some Montana Militia anti-any-kind-of-government wacko. I'm just a regular guy who remembers that these people were OUR SPIES when we were fighting the KGB in the Cold War. I believe the CIA tells lies because I depend on them not to tell the truth for national security's sake.
Many years ago, I was on a truck passing through the woods near Fort Bragg, on the way to a military exercise. The forest opened up and we saw what was clearly an airplane hanger, right there in the middle of nowhere. We asked the 82nd Airborne sergeant with us on the truck what that facility was. He told us we didn't see any facility in the woods, and that was the end of the conversation.
QUESTION: Did I really see an airline hanger?
ANSWER: Of course not. I'm lying and I just made that story up out of thin air.
Now, am I just a hyper-partisan, inventing a story trying to make a point? Or am I telling the truth about the story, and I lied about making it up? How do you know? Why should you trust me, either way? If I weren't some jerk with an under-read blog, and I were actually an intelligence agent looking to keep a secret, would you be more inclined to believe me about the "Truth" story or the "Lie" story? How do you know? Why should you trust me, either way?
Last question: After 9/11 and with the safety of the country hanging in the balance, do you really want to presume that you know ANYTHING about what's really going on in the WOT?
Do I think Saddam had anything to do with 9/11? I was told he was a target that needed to be eliminated, and so I supported going after the target. All other considerations are pointless.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.