slate.msn.com/id/2097901
There are those who continue to believe that there must have been some administration collusion in the planning and timing of the attacks. I notice that yet another book alleging this has attracted endorsements from about half of The Nation s editorial board. There are those who feel that America has antagonized the Muslim world enough already, and that the use of force in Afghanistan and Iraq only makes the enemy more angry. There are those who think that Iraq is a war too far to annex David Rieffs phrase and a distraction from the hunt for al-Qaida as well as a dangerous exercise in pre-emption. And there are those who think that the Clinton administration would have done, indeed was doing, a superior job. Of course this quartet of positions is not mutually exclusive, and elements of each are to be found in one another, but the third and fourth ones have emerged as the safest and most consensual with the reception accorded to Richard Clarkes book. Among those claiming to be vindicated by his testimony are Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, two senior counterterrorism figures from the Clinton National Security Council, whose not-bad book The Age of Sacred Terror , published in 2002, bears re-reading. Among other things, it contains on Pages 230-233 and 336-338 of the paperback version an interesting profile of Richard Clarke, who is depicted as an egotistical pain in the ass who had the merit of getting things right. This seems fair: He has been exposed as wildly wrong in saying that Condoleezza Rice had never even heard of al-Qaidaan allegation that almost amounts to the dread charge of character assassinationand his operatic bow to the families of the victims is fine unless you think as dont we all?
Thats putting it mildly, when you recall that Abu Nidals organization was a wing of the Baath Party, and that the late Abu Abbas of Klinghoffer fame was traveling on an Iraqi diplomatic passport. But, hold on a momentdoesnt every smart person know that theres no connection between Saddam Hussein and the world of terror? Continue Article Ah, we meant to say no connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden. Well, in that case, how do you explain the conviction, shared by Clarke and Benjamin and Simon, that Iraq was behind Bin Ladens deadly operation in Sudan? The Age of Sacred Terror justifies the Clinton strike on Khartoum on the grounds that Iraqi weapons-scientists were linked to Bin Ladens factory and that the suggestive chemical EMPTA, detected at the site, was used only by Iraq to make VX nerve gas. At the time, Clarke defended the bombing in almost the same words, telling the press that he was sure that intelligence existed linking bin Laden to Al Shifas current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan. The United States arms inspector upon whom all three relied at the time, for corroborating evidence implicating Saddam, was a man who has since become famous: David Kay. I should say that I am criticized by name in the Benjamin-Simon book for a series of anti-Clinton articles that I wrote at the time of the Al-Shifa raid. Even if the factory was not an aspirin-producing pharmaceutical plant, there seemed no justification for bombing it without warning and without even notifying Congress, let alone the United Nations. Foul as the Sudanese regime was, it did have diplomatic relations with Washington and it had previously agreed to deport Bin Laden to Afghanistan which was possibly, in retrospect, a mistake. There should have been a demand for inspections, followed by retaliation in case of noncompliance. Anyway, whatever the forensic truth about the factory may have been, the Clinton administration clearly regarded it as a front for Iraq/al-Qaida cooperation. Benjamin and Simon say that all would have been clear had the Clinton administration been willing to disclose its sources and methods: Id say that the case for declassifying that stuff would now be an overwhelming one, and I hope to hear them and Richard Clarke make it. The second raid that week, on an al-Qaida base in Afghanistan, missed Bin Laden but did kill some officers of the Pakistani secret police, or Inter-Service Intelligence, who were in his camp. Here, as one ought to have seen more clearly, was another link of state-sponsorship, connecting Pakistan to the Taliban and al-Qaida. One of the crucial reasons for apathy and inaction, in both the Clinton and Bush administrations, was the fact that two of the prime movers in jihad sponsorship, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, were considered official friends, not least by the American intelligence community. An unnoticed benefit of regime change in Afghanistan and Iraq is the extent to which both the Pakistani and Saudi oligarchies have been turned and their wings clipped. To listen to Clarke now, you could almost imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan and eviction of the Talibanthe actual first response of the administration to Sept.
To listen to Clarke, also, you would suppose that any Iraqi connection to terrorism was sucked straight out of Rumsfelds or Wolfowitzs thumb. One theory that does collapse completely is that of administration foreknowledgethe Bush people were evidently in no shape to take any quick advantage of the events and seemingly hadnt bothered to plant even one Iraqi among the mainly Saudi hijackers. But in my experience, dud theories die only to be replaced by new and even dumber ones. The current reigning favorite is that fighting al-Qaida in Iraq is a distraction from the fight against al-Qaida. Related in Slate Daniel Benjamin and Edward Jay Epstein debated the significance of links between Iraq and al-Qaida in this Dialogue last year. In a subsequent piece , Benjamin took a skeptical look at a leaked memo from Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith that argued that Saddam and Bin Laden had worked cooperatively. Benjamin responds specifically to claims that Iraq and al-Qaida collaborated in the manufacture of chemical weapons in Sudan in this sidebar . Click here to read an executive summary of Richard Clarkes book Against All Enemies . Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a regular contributor to Slate . His most recent book is A Long Short War: The Postponed Liberation of Iraq .
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