IRAQ

The Iraqi conflict will take center stage this week as Gen David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker appear before the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Service committees today and the House Foreign Affairs and Armed Services Committees on Wednesday.

We recommend a return to our posting of 5/10/07 - A Citizen’s Guide to Iraq http://bobcraven.blogspot.com/2007_05_01_archive.html - for a thorough background to these events.

There are those who allow that although the Afgan conflict was justified, the Iraqi conflict was not, that instead it was a construct of Republican greed or "neocon" imperialism and that to maintain as we always have that there was a direct linkage between Saddam and terror is not only utter nonsense but partisan deceit and treachery.

On Mar/13 the Pentagon released a study entitled the "Iraqi Perspectives Project, Saddam and Terrorism," a review of some 600,000 captured Iraqi documents. From that report, p ES-1, "The IPP review of captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism. From 1991 to 2003 the Saddam regime regarded inspiring, sponsoring, directing and executing acts of terrorism as an element of state power." From p ES-2, Saddam was willing to "...target no only Western interests but also to directly attack Americans."

We have heard from opponents of the Iraqi conflict that Iraq and al Qaeda were not obvious allies, that such a claim is bogus in support of the war. Yet from the report, "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda or that generally shared al Qaeda’s stated goals." Or, again from the left we hear that Saddam considered al Qaeda and other like-minded medievalists as a threat to his regime and thus he would have not have been interested in working with them. Yet from the report, "Captured documents reveal that the Iraqi regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al Qaeda..." Yet again from the willfully blind we hear that the religious radicals of al Qaeda and the secularists of Baathist Iraq simply did not trust one another. Yet from the IPP report, from an excerpt of an Iraqi Intelligence document dated Mar/18/93, we read that, "In a meeting in the Sudan we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt. We....agreed on a plan to carry out commando operations against the Egyptian regime."

There is much more, all of which indicates that those who believed that Saddam had little interest in terrorism and no real links to al Qaeda, were mistaken.

So we know why we are there. We know Saddam’s record, his clearly stated intentions and his ties to international terrorists, including as the IPP reveals a group headed by Ayman al-Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s second in command. But what of progress? As Democratic Senator Joe Lieberman noted in a recent WSJ editorial, "This time Gen Petraeus returns to Washington having led one of the most remarkably successful military operations in American history."

Only party zealots are found denying progress nowadays, the facts being a mere inconvenience to this exercise. From June/07 to Feb/08 deaths have fallen 90%. American casualties have fallen 70%. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been swept from its former strongholds and has been nearly destroyed as a fighting force in Iraq. In recent months the Iraqi government has passed key "benchmark" legislation on de-Baathification, amnesty, the budget and provincial elections; it has enlisted 425,000 men in its security forces; it has increased oil production substantially, funneling $100 million a year to its provinces at the present rate. Finally, as at least partial evidence that we have been correct all along in our prediction that Iraq would eventually adopt a working consensual government, Sunnis are now prepared to vote in mass in the provincial elections this fall.

Robert Craven