I had missed this article, Saddam collected information on dozens of potential targets in Israel.
Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service collected information on dozens of sites in Israel, including airports, other transportation centers, as well as scientific and religious centers that were thought to be potential targets for attacks.Among the sources providing intelligence to Saddam’s regime was Force 17, the security force of Yasser Arafat, which planned and carried out from its Ramallah headquarters attacks against Israeli targets.
This information emerged following the release of documents captured during the American invasion in 2003 and made available as part of a West Point program to evaluate the lessons of the war in Iraq.
In addition to the detailed collection of intelligence on potential Israeli targets, the documents also show that Saddam’s intelligence was following closely the links between Iran and Hezbollah and the potential that such ties could provide Iran to operate in the territories and in North Africa.
And remember Dr. Rantisi, a head of the “political” arm of Hamas?
Hamas representatives, including Abdel Aziz Rantisi, who was assassinated by the Israel Defense Forces in 2004, contacted Iraqi intelligence and asked to coordinate attacks against American and Israeli targets to delay the American invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Israel wasn’t his only target either:
A video recording of a meeting between Saddam and Yasser Arafat on April 19, 1990, showed Saddam threatening to assassinate then president George Bush. “We may not be able to reach Washington, but we could send someone with an explosives belt to Washington,” Saddam told Arafat, three months before the invasion of Kuwait.”We can send people to Washington. A man with an explosives belt could throw himself on Bush’s car.”
Saddam also told his Palestinian guest that he intended to launch surface-to-surface ballistic missiles against Tel Aviv and that he possessed chemical weapons that “have been successfully employed” against Iran – and he would not hesitate to also use them against Israel.
Remarkably, such revelations are getting very little coverage. I guess it’s more important to focus on the effects of the war than on what was possibly prevented.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
But you have to understand how left-wing people view the world.
You don’t take action against a potential threat, because nothing has been done yet. And after the attack happens, it’s too late to do anything. And a history of prior attacks is no reason to assume that there will be any future attacks.
Your only possible action is to defend yourself while the attack is in progress. Failure to do that will make you cruel and evil. But taking action at any other time makes you an imperialist conquerer.
At least that’s the only logical explanation for why the press reports things the way they do.
Either that or they simply side with the terrorists and dictators of the world. Which wouldn’t surprise me either.
Minor error, but annoying: Israel is not part of “The West”, as the term is normally used. For that matter, it’s clear that Saddam was, at the worst, a threat to Israel and the USA but not to the West as a whole.
The article notes that in 1990 Saddam promised Arafat that he would use chemical weapons against Israel. But of course when the Gulf War took place Saddam did not use chemical weapons against Israel.
Basically all the article shows is that Saddam was interested in sponsoring anti-Israeli terrorism and that he once promised the moon to Arafat but never delivered. Neither revelation is particularly surprising. The bit about the meeting between Saddam and Arafat is interesting, but hardly a major scoop.
And even if you think that “what was possibly prevented” justified invading Iraq, it doesn’t justify staying in there now, when Saddam and his sons are dead and the Ba’athist regime destroyed beyond any hope of resurrection.
Interesting that Saddam was talking about attacking America via a terrorist attack even before he invaded Kuwait. That looks like good evidence that Saddam knew America was an obstacle to his plans to aggrandize his power in the Middle East and wanted to remove American influence. It also shows that he was just as stupid as bin Laden and his merry men, since a really good way to get the USA to destroy your regime is to attack the US on its own soil. If the wimpiness and whining of the leftist and liberal (excuse me, progressive) nitwits in the US has been convincing the tyrants (like Saddam) and tyrant wannabes (like Osama) that the US will fold up and surrender if struck, they have even more to answer for than even I thought.
You’re forgetting his suggestion about assassinating Bush 41 before the Kuwait invasion Lefty.
As for the present campaign in Iraq, it is the central front of the war on the jihadist terrorists. Remember them? I could explain it to you in detail, but that would take up too much of Meryl’s resources. Suffice it to say the invading Iraq allowed the US to fight the terrorists on ground and terms of our own choosing, not their’s. We cannot win against them by standing on the defensive, since we would have to defend literally everything. The Iraq Campaign allowed us to take the initiative and force our enemies to respond to our moves, not we to the enemy’s moves.
We also must fight them ideologically, to pit our big idea against their big idea of the world-wide Caliphate. Our big idea is liberty and prosperity in the modern world, even if the tongue-tied Bush Administration is better at promoting this than explaining it. Here again, Iraq was the logical place in the Middle East to start this push.
Oh, and one of the reasons the Arabs hate Israel so much is that Israel really is a Western country. That’s what they mean when Arabs fulminate against Israel as an outpost of Imperialism. That many in the West, especially among the leftists, are so willing to throw Israel to the wolves is not evidence that Israel is not part of the West, it is evidence that many in the West are moral cretins.
I think Saddam’s threat to assassiate Bush 41 was like his threat to use CW against Israel — an idle boast made to impress Arafat. But that’s water under the bridge now.
As for fighting the jihadists on “terms on our choosing”, I consider the flypaper theory to be bunk. It’s like saying that we’re creating a swamp to fight the malaria-spreading mosquitos on our own terms.
Maybe you’re worried that if America pulled out then al-Qaeda types would somehow take over Iraq, the way they aligned themselves with the Taliban in Afghanistan. That seems most unlikely. A far more likely scenario is that the Shi’ites would start crushing the Sunnis in a very gruesome fashion, and that would be that. And if the Shi’ites couldn’t crush the Sunnis on their own, they’d do it with help from the Iranians.
(BTW, I supported the initial invasion of Iraq because I thought Saddam posed a long-term threat to Israel. And I still support the war because I think it’s still possible to give Iraq a soft landing into a creakily-functioning pseudo-democracy, a la Lebanon, though my patience is wearing thin. But I did not consider Saddam to be much of a threat to any democracy besides Israel, and I think what we’ve learned since the invasion suggests I was right, though it’s not like we can turn back the clock and run a controlled experiment.)
For the Arab world Israel is part of the West.
And yes it’s interesting that Saddam (at least) boasted of wanting to kill Bush 41 before invading Kuwait. (He actually hatched a plot after Clinton became president but it was foiled.)
I don’t know that he was only a threat to Israel. If he decided to annex another nearby country there would have been a need to go to war against him again anyway. Better on American terms than on his terms.
“If he [Saddam] decided to annex another nearby country there would have been a need to go to war against him again anyway.”
Why?
We had no defense treaty with Kuwait. And Kuwait is no democracy. Last I checked, organized political parties were banned there and it was technically illegal to build any house of worship besides a mosque. There was no good reason for America to take the lead in defending Kuwait. (Oil was a bad reason.) I’d have felt bad about an occupied Kuwait, but the other Arab governments should have figured out how to deal with one of their own.
And if we had not fought the Gulf War, and in particular if we had never stationed troops in Saudi Arabia, the Twin Towers would probably still be standing today. (Though again, it’s not like we can turn back the clock and run a controlled experiment.)