CNN: McCain, Obama in heated exchange over Iraq
McCain questioned whether Obama was aware of the al Qaeda base. Obama’s response was: “There was no such thing as al Qaeda in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq.”
SADDAM HUSSEIN “always had links with international terrorist organizations.”
On the face of it, this is not a controversial statement. It comes from a CNN interview of Iyad Allawi, recently chosen as the interim prime minister of Iraq. Allawi expanded on this assessment in a December 31, 2003, interview with CNN’s Bill Hemmer, when he estimated that more than 1,000 al Qaeda terrorists were operating in Iraq. But his more interesting comment came moments later. The al Qaeda fighters, he said,
were present in Iraq, they came and they were active in Iraq before the war of liberation. They were inflicting a lot of problems on the–and inflaming the situation in northern Iraq, in Iraq Kurdistan. They killed once about a year and a half ago 42 worshipers in one of the mosques in Harachi [ph] in a very ugly way.
Again, on the surface, this was not a particularly revealing statement. After all, Colin Powell told the United Nations Security Council that al Qaeda was operating in Iraq–almost certainly with the knowledge and approval of the Iraqi regime–before the war. CIA Director George Tenet has testified to the presence of al Qaeda in Iraq on several occasions. Allawi went on:Those people have had the backing of Saddam prior to liberation, and they remained in Iraq after the collapse, and after the vacuum was created. After the way, they remained in Iraq. Many joined them since then.
Rather than blaming Bush and McCain, why not also blame the many Democrats who were in favor of invasion?
“I understand that Sen. Obama said that if al Qaeda established a base in Iraq that he would send troops back in militarily. Al Qaeda already has a base in Iraq. It’s called al Qaeda in Iraq,” McCain said.
“It’s a remarkable statement to say that you would send troops back to a place where al Qaeda has established a base — where they have already established a base.”
More on the Iraq — al Qaeda connections from Brandon Miniter:
* Abdul Rahman Yasin was the only member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb to remain at large in the Clinton years. He fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam’s hometown, that show that Iraq gave Mr. Yasin both a house and monthly salary.
* Bin Laden met at least eight times with officers of Iraq’s Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam’s son Qusay, and met with officials from Saddam’s mukhabarat, its external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was speaking before the United Nations Security Council on February 6, 2003.
* Sudanese intelligence officials told me that their agents had observed meetings between Iraqi intelligence agents and bin Laden starting in 1994, when bin Laden lived in Khartoum.
* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Mr. Powell.
* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid-1990s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam’s men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator, Mr. Powell told the United Nations.
* In 1999 the Guardian, a British newspaper, reported that Farouk Hijazi, a senior officer in Iraq’s mukhabarat, had journeyed deep into the icy mountains near Kandahar, Afghanistan, in December 1998 to meet with al Qaeda men. Mr. Hijazi is “thought to have offered bin Laden asylum in Iraq,” the Guardian reported.
* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested near the Afghan border by Pakistani authorities, according to Jane’s Foreign Report, a respected international newsletter. Jane’s reported that Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, now al Qaeda’s No. 2 man.
And since we’re reviewing for Senator Obama, why did we invade Iraq?
The war began in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Instead of officially ending, hostilities were suspended in 1991 with a conditional armistice. In order to retain personal power, the Iraqi dictator had to agree to unrestricted weapons inspections by the UN, among other things.
Over the course of a dozen years, Saddam violated every part of the agreement that he thought he could get away with, much to his own people’s misery. Even so, he was given every opportunity to avoid war, including an eleventh hour offer of safe passage out of the country and a life of luxury in exile.
He continued to flout the terms of the armistice by barring inspections, which must be considered a blatantly unnecessary provocation by those who now believe that he had nothing to hide. Unless international law isn’t meant to be respected (which is an entirely different debate), the UN had no choice but to authorize military action to enforce its own resolutions.
Therefore the war wasn’t started by America. It was insisted on by Saddam Hussein.
Moreover, the invasion of Iraq was part of a broader fight against global terror, which expanded greatly during the 1990s.
Obama’s ignorance / dishonesty are disturbing.
Filed under: Barack Obama / The Messiah, John McCain/Sarah Palin, The Religion of Peace Files , Barack Obama / The Messiah, John McCain/Sarah Palin
