Al Qaeda and Iraq

The top news story on Technorati right now is the Washington Post article discussing a just-declassified report by the Defense Department that allegedly puts paid to the notion that the Baath government in Iraq had suborned or sponsored Al Qaeda.

Of course, Dick Cheney's appearance on Rush Limbaugh's radio program–in which the vice president insisted that Saddam and Osama were well acquainted and cooperating before 2003–has incited the type of response one would expect. (Though Cheney has never come out and said that Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks, his qualified statements about Iraq's culpability in sponsoring global jihadists — Al Qaeda operatives included — have been taken up by the antiwar crowd as just such a propagation of falsehood, another canard in the quick, furious and irresponsible march to war.)

Nowhere in this WaPo piece is it mentioned that Richard Clarke, now the doyen of the truthiness-to-power factions, included Saddam's covert negotiations with Al Qaeda in the U.S. legal brief that justified the Clinton administration's spate of bombings of military sites inside Iraq in the late 90's. Nor will you find much on this: As early as October 2001, members of Ansar al-Islam had attempted to assassinate the brilliant, brave PUK secretary-general of Sulaimaniyah Dr. Barham Salih. Salih went on record saying, in effect, that isn't interesting that jihadists would come out of the woodwork in Iraq's northern region at the exact time that Bin Laden declared himself international Public Enemy Number One.

Ansar al-Islam is (or was) a terrorist cell that, according to Human Rights Watch, culled from the ranks of Hamas, Islamic Jihad and native Kurdish Islamist groups. It was previously known as Jund al-Islam, which openly declared itself a sworn enemy of the "secular" Saddam Hussein yet never shied from murdering and intimidating his Kurdish democratic antagonists. (The enemy of one's enemy is still an enemy according to the stupid and primitive logic of jihad.) Ansar al-Islam was later absorbed into Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's precursor outfit as what he conveniently called "Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia." The inevitable question: Just how affiliated was Zarqawi with Bin Laden before the coalition invasion of Iraq, and when exactly did the late Jordanian thug enter the country?

This is false:

Zarqawi, whom Cheney depicted yesterday as an agent of al-Qaeda in Iraq before the war, was not then an al-Qaeda member but was the leader of an unaffiliated terrorist group who occasionally associated with al-Qaeda adherents, according to several intelligence analysts. He publicly allied himself with al-Qaeda in early 2004, after the U.S. invasion.

The only biography written of Zarqawi was by the French journalist Jean Charles-Brisard. Here's what Charles-Brisard wrote in Zarqawi: The New Face of Al Qaeda, published in 2005 [Note: Suwaqah is the Jordanian prison in which Zarqawi served a sentence for terrorism before being released by King Abdullah in 1999 in an act of universal amnesty for terrorists. Hussein was worried what native Islamists might do with their parliamentary bloc if he refused]:

On the basis of the charisma he had displayed at Suwaqah and his knowledge of the small world of Jordanian Islamists, Zarqawi had established himself as the leader of the group of Jordanians who came with him to Afghanistan. These included not only his first comrades from the time of Bayt Al-Imam, Khaled Al-Aruri and Abdel Hadi Daghlas, both of whom had left prison in 1999, but also all sorts of future fighters. In the space of a few weeks he had shown surprising skill in reconstituting an operational group and bringing his partisans into Al-Qaeda. Zarqawi then moved into a "guest house" large enough for his group of about forty Jordanians in the village of Logo, several kilometers west of Kabul, an area traditionally under the control of the extremist leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He leaned on Al-Qaeda, of course, at first to take advantage of its equipment and logistical support so that he could plan large-scale operations. The man who opened the door of Bin Laden's structure to this group of Jordanians was a Jordanian himself, Abu Zubaydah, Al-Qaeda's head of operations.

By the end of 1999 and the beginning of 2000 Zarqawi had proved himself an important part of the Al-Qaeda apparatus in Afghanistan, and in 2001 he took the oath of allegiance to Bin Laden. To void any conflict between dissident factions (in particular the Algerian groups), starting in May 2001 the Taliban required all heads of training camps who wanted to pursue their activities to swear allegiance to their regime.

Having taken this step, Zarqawi had to conform to the ideological line set by Osama Bin Laden. The oath of allegiance was a way for Bin Laden to rein in rebellious spirits, but it was primarily a way to bring the different "Islamo-nationalist" groups together under a single banner. The oath, written by Bin Laden himself, is as follows: "I recall the committment to God, in order to listen to and obey my superiors, who are accomplishing this task with energy, difficulty, and giving of self, and in order that God may protect us so God's words are the highest and his religion victorious."

[…]

According to a confidential document of the Spanish antiterrorist unit UCIE (Unidad Central de Informacion Exterior), at the end of the summer of 1999 Zarqawi joined the second circle [of Al Qaeda], the circle of Bin Laden's lieutenants. By this time he was no longer an unknown or marginal figure. He was assigned the planning of the group's operations, and as such was in charge of several dozen militants.

Shadi Abdalla, Bin Laden's former bodyguard, later told the German intelligence services that Zarqawi's rise within the Al-Qaeda hierarchy owed a great deal to Abu Zubaydah, who was himself very close to Osama Bin Laden. Both men were Jordanians; both were inspired by a visceral hatred of the Hashemite regime. Zarqawi is said to have assisted Zubaydah in the preparation of the so-called millennium attacks against Western interest in Jordan. During this first terrorist operation on the international level he would win the trust of the Al-Qaeda staff and of Bin Laden in particular.

Abu Zubaydah is now in U.S. custody, and though some argue he's mentally unhinged, his information apparently led to the capture of multiple Al Qaeda agents abroad.

So, then: Zarqawi took an oath of fealty and allegiance to Osama Bin Laden just four months prior to the September 11 attacks. Why on earth was such an oath mandated at that time, do you suppose? And why are we still reading in major American newspapers that Zarqawi and Bin Laden were barely even on nodding terms with one another?

UPDATE [April, 9]: I stupidly forgot to mention in my original post the following revelation in a Foreign Affairs essay, published last year, on the internal mechanics of Saddam's republic of fear. Based on captured Baathist records, we now know that the fascist tyrant supposedly "in his box" had tasked his most gruesome paramilitary milita the Saddam Fedayeen with

[taking] part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for "special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan]." Preparations for "Blessed July," a regime-directed wave of "martyrdom" operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.