Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda link allegations
The Saddam–al-Qaeda conspiracy theory was based on false claims by the United States government alleging that a secretive relationship existed between Iraqi president Saddam Hussein and the Sunni pan-Islamist militant organization al-Qaeda between 1992 and 2003. The George W. Bush administration promoted it as a main rationale for invading Iraq in 2003.
This article is about issues concerning allegations of pre-invasion links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. For the al-Qaeda presence involved during the Iraqi insurgency, see Al-Qaeda in Iraq.The conspiracy theory dates to the aftermath of the Gulf War, when Iraqi Intelligence Service officers allegedly met al-Qaeda members in 1992. After the September 11 attacks in 2001, the conspiracy theory gained worldwide attention. The consensus of intelligence experts, backed up by reports from the 9/11 Commission, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, and declassified Defense Department reports, was that these contacts never led to a relationship between Saddam and al-Qaeda. Critics of the Bush administration have said that Bush was intentionally building a case for war with Iraq with no regard for factual evidence.
Skepticism[edit]
Conflicting goals and ideologies[edit]
Saddam Hussein was a Ba'athist, and Ba'athism combines pan-Arab nationalism with Arab socialism. The ideological founder of Ba'athism, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian.[35] The movement is at odds with political Islam, with which Saddam had been in conflict;[36] Saddam exiled Ayatollah Khomeini to France when the ayatollah attempted to incite the Iraqi Shia to overthrow him when Khomeini was in exile in Najaf, which was a catalyst for the Iranian Revolution and the resulting Iran-Iraq war. Khomeini pitted Saddam against Islamic radicalism; Saddam's people were inspired by the Iranian Revolution and eight years of "holy war" against Iranians who used suicide tactics. This wreaked havoc on the Iraqi armed forces, who solved the problem with chemical weapons.
During the Lebanese Civil War, Saddam supported Michel Aoun and the Christian Maronites instead of the Amal Movement or Hezbollah, which were funded by Iran and most other Arab countries. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Osama bin Laden offered to defend Saudi Arabia by sending mujahideen from Afghanistan to repel Saddam's forces. After the Gulf War, bin Laden continued to criticize Saddam's Ba'ath administration and emphasized that Saddam could not be trusted. Bin Laden told his biographer that "the land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is fucking his mother."[37] Saddam abolished sharia courts in Iraq, cracked down on Islamist movements (responding with mass executions and torture when he felt threatened by them), promoted Western ideals of society and law (he allegedly told Western diplomats that Iraq's "national drink" was Johnnie Walker Blue),[38] and usually retained secular Sunnis and Christians in his government.
Robert Pape's study of suicide terrorism found that "al-Qaeda's transnational suicide terrorists have come overwhelmingly from America's closest allies in the Muslim world and not at all from the Muslim regimes that the U.S. State Department considers 'state sponsors of terrorism'."[39] Pape notes that no al-Qaeda suicide attackers came from Iraq. Daniel Byman's study of state sponsorship of terrorism also did not list Iraq as a significant state sponsor and called the al-Qaeda connection "a rationale that before the war was strained and after it seems an ever-weaker reed."[40] Counterterrorism experts Rohan Gunaratna, Bruce Hoffman and Daniel Benjamin and journalists Peter Bergen and Jason Burke (both of whom have written extensively about al-Qaeda) have found no evidence of a collaborative relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. This conclusion agrees with investigations by the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, and the 9/11 Commission. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reviewed the CIA investigation, and found that the agency's conclusion that there was no evidence of operational collaboration was justified.
Although Saddam was not involved in the September 11 attacks, members of his government had contacts with al-Qaeda; however, the links are not considered by experts and analysts as convincing evidence of a collaborative, operational relationship. Former counterterrorism czar Richard A. Clarke writes,
Background[edit]
Saddam invoked religion shortly before the 1990 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait (possibly to bolster his government), adding the words "God is Great" in Arabic to the flag and referring to God in his speeches. He began the Faith Campaign in 1994, which included the construction and repair of mosques,[49] the closure of night clubs, and changes to the law which restricted alcohol consumption.[50]
Some sources allege that several meetings between top Iraqi operatives and bin Laden took place. These claims have been disputed by other sources, including most of the original intelligence agencies that investigated the allegations. Many in the intelligence community are skeptical about whether such meetings, if they took place at all, resulted in any meaningful relationship. Many of the claims of collaboration seem to have originated with associates of the Iraqi National Congress, whose credibility has been questioned and who have been accused of manipulating evidence to lure the United States into war on false pretenses. Raw intelligence reports also reached public awareness through the leaking of a memo from Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas J. Feith to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence,[51] the conclusions of which have been disputed by intelligence agencies which include the CIA. Feith's view of the relationship between Saddam and Osama differed from the official view of the intelligence community, and the memo was leaked to the media. The Pentagon issued a statement that the memo was "a classified annex containing a list and description of the requested reports, so that the committee could obtain the reports from the relevant members of the intelligence community ... The classified annex was not an analysis of the substantive issue of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda, and it drew no conclusions." It added, "Individuals who leak or purport to leak classified information are doing serious harm to national security; such activity is deplorable and may be illegal."[52] Former DIA Middle East section head W. Patrick Lang told the Washington Post that the Weekly Standard article, which published Feith's memo, "is a listing of a mass of unconfirmed reports, many of which themselves indicate that the two groups continued to try to establish some sort of relationship. If they had such a productive relationship, why did they have to keep trying?" According to the Post, "another former senior intelligence official said the memo is not an intelligence product but rather 'data points ... among the millions of holdings of the intelligence agencies, many of which are simply not thought likely to be true.'"[53]
It has been suggested that an understanding was reached between Iraq and al-Qaeda that al-Qaeda would not act against Saddam in exchange for Iraqi support (primarily in the form of training), but no evidence of such an understanding has been produced. Mohamed Atta allegedly met with an Iraqi intelligence operative in Prague, but intelligence officials have concluded that no such meeting took place. A training camp in Salman Pak (south of Baghdad) was said by a number of defectors to have been used to train international terrorists (assumed to be al-Qaeda members) in hijacking techniques, using a real airplane as a prop. The defectors were inconsistent about a number of details; the camp has been examined by U.S. Marines, and intelligence analysts do not believe that it was used by al-Qaeda. Some analysts believe that it was used for counterterrorism training, and others believe it was used to train foreign fighters overtly allied with Iraq. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence concluded, "Postwar findings support the April 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) assessment that there was no credible reporting on al-Qa'ida training at Salman Pak or anywhere else in Iraq. There have been no credible reports since the war that Iraq trained al-Qa'ida operatives at Salman Pak to conduct or support transnational terrorist operations."[54]
In November 2001, a month after the September 11 attacks, Mubarak al-Duri was contacted by Sudanese intelligence services who told him that the FBI had sent Jack Cloonan and several other agents to speak with a number of people known to have ties to bin Laden. Al-Duri and another Iraqi colleague agreed to meet with Cloonan in a safe house overseen by the intelligence service. They laughed when asked about any connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, saying that bin Laden hated the dictator whom he considered a "Scotch-drinking, woman-chasing apostate."[55]