www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0312.bergen.html
As of this writing, there appears to be no evidence that Saddam had either weapons of mass destruction or significant ties to terrorist groups like al Qaeda. Yet the belief that Saddam posed an imminent threat to the United States amounted to a theological conviction within the administration, a conviction successfully sold to the American public. In the past year, there has been a flood of stories about the thinking of neoconservative hawks such as Richard Perle, until March the chairman of the influential Defense Policy Board and a key architect of the presidents get-tough-on-Iraq policy. Perle has had a long association with the American Enterprise Institute AEI, a conservative think tank that was also home to other out-of-power hawks during the Clinton years such as John Bolton, now under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs. It was at AEI that the idea took shape that overthrowing Saddam should be a fundamental goal of United States foreign policy. Still, none of the thinker/operatives at AEI, or indeed any of the other neocon hawks such as Paul Wolfowitz, were in any real way experts on Iraq or had served in the region. Moreover, the majority of those in and out of government who were Middle East experts had grave concerns about the wisdom of invading Iraq and serious doubts about claims that Saddams regime posed an urgent threat to American security. What, then, gave neoconservatives like Wolfowitz and Perle such abiding faith in their own positions? Historians will be debating that question for years, but an important part of the reason has to do with someone you may well have never heard of: Laurie Mylroie. Mylroie has an impressive array of credentials that certify her as an expert on the Middle East, national security, and, above all, Iraq. She has held faculty positions at Harvard and the United States Naval War College and worked at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as well as serving as an advisor on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign. During the 1980s, Mylroie was an apologist for Saddams regime, but reversed her position upon his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, and, with the zeal of the academic spurned, became rabidly anti-Saddam. In the run up to the first Gulf War, Mylroie with New York Times reporter Judith Miller wrote Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, a well-reviewed bestseller translated into more than a dozen languages. Until this point, there was nothing controversial about Mylroies career. This would change with the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, the first act of international terrorism within the United States, which would launch Mylroie on a quixotic quest to prove that Saddams regime was the most important source of terrorism directed against this country. She laid out her case in Study of Revenge: Saddam Husseins Unfinished War Against America , a book published by AEI in 2000 which makes it clear that Mylroie and the neocon hawks worked hand in glove to push her theory that Iraq was behind the 93 Trade Center bombing. Its acknowledgements fulsomely thanked John Bolton and the staff of AEI for their assistance, while Richard Perle glowingly blurbed the book as splendid and wholly convincing. Lewis Scooter Libby, now Vice President Cheneys chief of staff, is thanked for his generous and timely assistance. And it appears that Paul Wolfowitz himself was instrumental in the genesis of Study of Revenge : His then-wife is credited with having fundamentally shaped the book, while of Wolfowitz, she says: At critical times, he provided crucial support for a project that is inherently difficult. None of which was out of the ordinary, except for this: Mylroie became enamored of her theory that Saddam was the mastermind of a vast anti-US terrorist conspiracy in the face of virtually all evidence and expert opinion to the contrary. She is, in short, a crackpot, which would not be significant if she were merely advising say, Lyndon LaRouche. But her neocon friends who went on to run the war in Iraq believed her theories, bringing her on as a consultant at the Pentagon, and they seem to continue to entertain her eccentric belief that Saddam is the fount of the entire shadow war against America. Hussein on the brain According to Bob Woodwards book Bush at War , immediately after 9/11 Wolfowitz told the cabinet: There was a 10 to 50 per cent chance Saddam was involved. A few days later, President Bush told his top aides: I believe that Iraq was involved, but Im not going to strike them now. However, the most comprehensive criminal investigation in history-involving chasing down 500,000 leads and interviewing 175,000 people-has turned up no evidence of Iraqs involvement, while the occupation of Iraq by a substantial American army has also uncovered no such link. Moreover, the United States State Departments counterterrorism office, which every year releases an authoritative survey of global terrorism, stated in its 2000 report: Iraq has not attempted an anti-western attack since its failed attempt to assassinate former President Bush in 1993 in Kuwait. In other words, by 9/11, Saddams regime had not engaged in anti-American terrorism for almost a decade. Ideas do not appear out of nowhere, so how is it that key members of the Bush administration believed that Iraq had been so deeply involved in terrorism directed at United States targets for many years? This was a deduction which she reached following an examination of Basits passport records and her discovery that Yousef and Basit were four inches different in height. On this wafer-thin foundation she builds her case that Yousef must have therefore been an Iraqi agent given access to Basits passport following the Iraq occupation. However, United States investigators say that Yousef and Basit are in fact one and the same person, and that the man Mylroie describes as an Iraqi agent is in fact a Pakistani with ties to al Qaeda. Mylroie appears never to have absorbed the implications of Occams Razor, the basic philosophical and scientific principle generally understood to be: Of two competing theories or explanations, all other things being equal, the simpler one is to be preferred. In this case the simpler-and more accurate-explanation of Yousef/Basits identity is that he was part of the al Qaeda network, not working for Baghdad. Indeed, an avalanche of evidence demonstrates that Yousef was part of the loosely knit al Qaeda organization, evidence that Mylroie does not consider as it would undermine all her suppositions. When Yousef flew to New York from Pakistan in 1992 before the bombing of the Trade Center, he was accompanied by Ahmad Ajaj, who was arrested at Kennedy Airport on immigration charges, and was later found to have an al Qaeda bomb-making manual in his luggage. Al Qaeda member Jamal al-Fadl told a New York jury in 2000 that he saw Yousef at the groups Sadda training camp on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border some time between 1989 and 1991. When Yousef lived in the Philippines in the early 1990s, his partner in terrorism was Wali Khan Amin Shah, who had trained in Afghanistan under bin Laden. A number of Yousefs co-conspirators had ties to a Brooklyn organization known as the Afghan Refugee Center. This was the American arm of an organization bin Laden founded in Pakistan during the mid-1980s that would later evolve into al Qaeda. Yousefs uncle, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, sent him money for the Trade Center attack, and would later go on to become al Qaedas military commander and the chief planner of 9/11. The point is that the 1993 attack was plotted not by Iraqi intelligence, but by men who were linked to al Qaeda. In addition to ignoring Yousefs many connections to al Qaeda, Mylroie is clearly aware that in 1995, he gave what would be his only interview to the Arabic newspaper al Hayat since she alludes to it in her book Study of Revenge . I have no connection with Iraq, said Yousef to his interviewer, adding for good measure that the Iraqi people must not pay for the mistakes made by Saddam. Yousef went on to say that he wanted to aid members of Egypts Jihad group, a terrorist organizatio...
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