Terrorisme/Irak: Pourquoi Saddam était bien derrière le 11/9 (Why Saddam was indeed behind 9/11)

It should not be hidden from you that the people of Islam had suffered from aggression, iniquity and injustice imposed on them by the Zionist-Crusaders alliance and their collaborators; to the extent that the Muslims blood became the cheapest and their wealth as loot in the hands of the enemies. Their blood was spilled in Palestine and Iraq. The horrifying pictures of the massacre of Qana, in Lebanon are still fresh in our memory. Massacres in Tajakestan, Burma, Cashmere, Assam, Philippine, Fatani, Ogadin, Somalia, Erithria, Chechnia and in Bosnia-Herzegovina took place, massacres that send shivers in the body and shake the conscience. (…)  The people of Islam awakened and realised that they are the main target for the aggression of the Zionist-Crusaders alliance. All false claims and propaganda about « Human Rights » were hammered down and exposed by the massacres that took place against the Muslims in every part of the world. The youths hold you responsible for all of the killings and evictions of the Muslims and the violation of the sanctities, carried out by your Zionist brothers in Lebanon; you openly supplied them with arms and finance. More than 600,000 Iraqi children have died due to lack of food and medicine and as a result of the unjustifiable aggression (sanction) imposed on Iraq and its nation. The children of Iraq are our children. You, the USA, together with the Saudi regime are responsible for the shedding of the blood of these innocent children.  (…) The latest and the greatest of these aggressions, incurred by the Muslims since the death of the Prophet (ALLAH’S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM) is the occupation of the land of the two Holy Places -the foundation of the house of Islam, the place of the revelation, the source of the message and the place of the noble Ka’ba, the Qiblah of all Muslims- by the armies of the American Crusaders and their allies. (…) there is no more important duty than pushing the American enemy out of the holy land. Osama Bin Laden (1996)

No President wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it’s just simply not true. My attitude about the defense of this country changed on September the 11th. We — when we got attacked, I vowed then and there to use every asset at my disposal to protect the American people. Our foreign policy changed on that day, Helen. You know, we used to think we were secure because of oceans and previous diplomacy. But we realized on September the 11th, 2001, that killers could destroy innocent life. And I’m never going to forget it. And I’m never going to forget the vow I made to the American people that we will do everything in our power to protect our people. Part of that meant to make sure that we didn’t allow people to provide safe haven to an enemy. And that’s why I went into Iraq (…) The Taliban provided safe haven for Al-Qaeda. That’s where Al-Qaeda trained – (…) Afghanistan provided safe haven for al Qaeda. That’s where they trained. That’s where they plotted. That’s where they planned the attacks that killed thousands of innocent Americans. I also saw a threat in Iraq. I was hoping to solve this problem diplomatically. That’s why I went to the Security Council; that’s why it was important to pass 1441, which was unanimously passed. And the world said, disarm, disclose, or face serious consequences – (…) and therefore, we worked with the world, we worked to make sure that Saddam Hussein heard the message of the world. And when he chose to deny inspectors, when he chose not to disclose, then I had the difficult decision to make to remove him. And we did, and the world is safer for it. George Bush (2006)

Although Saddam’s attitude to al Qaeda has not always been consistent, he has generally rejected suggestions of cooperation. Intelligence nonetheless indicates that … meetings have taken place between senior Iraqi representatives and senior al Qaeda operatives. Butler’s report (2002)

Reporting since (February) suggests that senior al Qaeda associate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi has established sleeper cells in Baghdad, to be activated during a U.S. occupation of the city. These cells apparently intend to attack U.S. targets using car bombs and other weapons. (It is also possible that they have received CB materials from terrorists in the KAZ), » referring to chemical and biological materials and the Kurdish Autonomous Zone. « Al Qaeda-associated terrorists continued to arrive in Baghdad in early March. Ousted President Saddam Hussein didn’t have any control over the Kurdish zone in northern Iraq. And British analysts believed there was no active cooperation between Saddam and al Qaeda. Butler’s report (2004)

In April 2007, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet released his memoir titled At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA. In the book he reveals that in July 2001, an associate of Zarqawi had been detained and, during interrogations, linked Zarqawi with al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah. Tenet also wrote in his book that Thirwat Shihata and Yussef Dardiri, « assessed by a senior al-Qa’ida detainee to be among the Egyptian Islamic Jihad’s best operational planners, » arrived in Baghdad in May 2002 and were engaged in « sending recruits to train in Zarqawi’s camps. » (…) In his book At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet writes: … by the spring and summer of 2002, more than a dozen al-Qa’ida-affiliated extremists converged on Baghdad, with apparently no harassment on the part of the Iraqi government. They found a comfortable and secure envirnonment in which they moved people and supplies to support Zarqawi’s operations in northern Iraq.  According to Tenet, while Zarqawi did find a safe haven in Iraq and did supervise camps in northeastern Iraq run by Ansar al-Islam, « the intelligence did not show any Iraqi authority, direction, or control over any of the many specific terrorist acts carried out by al-Qa’ida. » Wikipedia

This is perhaps the most fundamental way that Sept. 11 is linked to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: the latter did not plan or hatch the former, but the former taught Washington a lesson about the danger of failing to confront threats before they are fully formed. In the same manner, the appeasement of Hitler at Munich at once had nothing and everything to do with how America responded to Stalin and his successors in Berlin, Korea, Cuba and Afghanistan. … Since a wounded Saddam could not be left unattended and an oil-rich Saudi Arabia could not be left unprotected, U.S. troops took up long-term residence in the Saudi kingdom, a fateful decision that started the clock ticking toward 9/11. As bin Laden himself explained in his oft-quoted 1996 fatwa, his central aim was “to expel the occupying enemy from the country of the two Holy places.”… Put another way, bin Laden’s casus belli was an unintended and unforeseen byproduct of what Saddam Hussein had done in 1990. The presence of U.S. troops in the land of Mecca and Medina had galvanized al-Qaeda, which carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which triggered America’s global war on terror, which inevitably led back to Iraq, which is where America finds itself today. In a sense, occupation was inevitable after Desert Storm; perhaps the United States ended up occupying the wrong country. … If the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia sparked bin Laden’s global guerrilla war, America’s low threshold for casualties would serve as the fuel to keep it raging. … From bin Laden’s vantage point, America’s retreats from Beirut in the 1980s, Mogadishu in the 1990s and Yemen in 2000 were evidence of weakness. “When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you,” he recalled. “The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the heart of every Muslim and a remedy to the chests of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut, Aden and Mogadishu.” … Hence, quitting Iraq could have dramatic and disastrous consequences – something like the fall of Saigon, Desert One, and the Beirut and Mogadishu pullouts all rolled into one giant propaganda victory for the enemy. Not only would it leave a nascent democracy unprotected from bin Laden’s henchmen, it would serve to confirm their perception that America is a paper tiger lacking the will to fight or to stand with those who are willing to fight. Who would count on America the next time? For that matter, on whom would America be able to count as the wars of 9/11 continue? … Finally, retreat also would re-energize the enemy and pave the way toward his ultimate goal. Imagine Iraq spawning a Balkan-style ethno-religious war while serving as a Taliban-style springboard for terror. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s top terrorist in Iraq, already has said, “We fight today in Iraq, and tomorrow in the land of the two Holy Places, and after there the West.” Alan W. Dowd

Intéressante tribune dans The American Legion Magazine du mois dernier, par le chercheur du Sagamore Institute Alan W. Dowd, qui confirme de la manière la plus claire le lien, si fréquemment nié, entre Saddam et le 11/9, et plus précisément entre Desert Storm et Iraqi Freedom.

En un mot, il est évident que c’est le problème non résolu en 1990 (quand on a laissé Saddam en place après son invasion du Koweit) qui, en nécessitant le stationnement de troupes en Arabie wahhabite pour le contenir, a servi de prétexte à Ben Laden & co pour leur ignoble forfait de septembre 2001. D’où la nécessité, pour retirer ce prétexte auxdits djihadistes, de revenir terminer la tâche interrompue douze ans plus tôt.

Mais c’est aussi et surtout la dure leçon, hélas oubliée depuis 1938, des dangers de l’apaisement et du refus de faire face aux menaces au moment où elles se présentent.

Ce qui au passage éclaire d’un nouveau jour la position du “camp auto-proclamé de la paix”, qui, France en tête, ne proposait en fait rien sinon le statu quo, à savoir la continuation de l’endiguement de Saddam.

Mais naturellement, la France ayant, comme on le sait, courageusement et très vite, abandonné les missions de survol de protection des zones kurdes et chiites qui servaient justement à cet endiguement, .… aux frais des alliés !

Et quels frais puisqu’au delà des dépenses en personnel et millions de dollars dépensés, c’est ce qui a servi (puisque, comme rappelé plus haut, il fallait bien baser les troupes nécessaires quelque part de proche et protéger les sources d’énergie de la planète) de prétexte au 11/9 !

Sans compter tous les efforts du Quai d’Orsay et de ses amis pour détourner et miner de l’intérieur, l’autre volet de cet endiguement, à savoir l’embargo et le programme “Pétrole contre nourriture” …

9/11 And The War In Iraq Are Linked Because…
Alan W. Dowd
The American Legion Magazine
May, 2006

“The wars of 9/11,” as Simon Serfaty of Center for Security and International Studies concluded just weeks after the attacks that maimed Manhattan and scarred the Pentagon, “will be a decisive test of America’s credibility as a durable power.” In other words, he recognized that it wasn’t Sept. 11 alone, horrible as it was, that would test America, but also the path America would choose in response to Sept. 11.

That path has led U.S. troops into Afghanistan and Pakistan, to Kyrgyzstan and other former Soviet republics, to the borderlands of Syria and Iran, to the Philippines and Djibouti, and all the way to Timbuktu (literally) – and, of course, into Iraq. Now, amid these wars of 9/11, America faces perhaps its sternest test here at home.

That’s because, even though the U.S. military wins every engagement in Iraq, the war effort is steadily losing the one thing that matters most: the support of the American people. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed long before the British carved out the borders of Iraq, “Among democratic nations, the private soldiers remain most like civilians; upon them, the habits of the nation have the firmest hold and public opinion has the most influence.”

In other words, polls do matter, especially in a time of war. And to the extent that polls reflect public attitudes about what promises to be a long, hard war on terrorism, the polls have been worrisome since late 2003.

For instance, less than half of Americans polled now identify the war in Iraq as part of the wider war on terror. And that number is falling. With U.S. troops dying at a steady and somber rate of two per day, 60 percent of Americans say Iraq is not worth the costs. With more than 2,300 Americans killed in Iraq, more than half of the public supports a rapid withdrawal. That percentage is growing.

Yet as Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute has found in a massive survey of post-9/11 polling data, more than eight in 10 Americans said in autumn 2001 they would support military action against any nation found to be aiding terrorists. Almost as many Americans – 77 percent – said in early 2003 that Iraq was part of the war on terror. Bowman also has unearthed a CNN poll that asked Americans just days after 9/11 if they would support military action even if it meant 5,000 troops would be killed. In a sign of our grim, if ephemeral, determination, 76 percent said yes.

In short, although the doomsayers and bad-news media say otherwise, there was a time when the American people recognized that it would take time to wage the wars of 9/11. There was even a time when the American people recognized that 9/11 and Iraq were linked, though not in the manner the war critics have come to ridicule.

…we changed.

For good or ill, Sept. 11 changed the very DNA of U.S. national-security policy. “Any administration in such a crisis,” as historian John Lewis Gaddis concludes in “Surprise, Security and the American Experience,” “would have had to rethink what it thought it knew about security and hence strategy.” Was deterrence any longer possible? Was containment viable? Was it responsible to give the benefit of the doubt to repeat offenders like Saddam Hussein? One by one, the Bush administration answered those questions. And the answer to each was “no,” which is why Sept. 11 led first to Afghanistan, then to Baghdad.

This is perhaps the most fundamental way that Sept. 11 is linked to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq: the latter did not plan or hatch the former, but the former taught Washington a lesson about the danger of failing to confront threats before they are fully formed. In the same manner, the appeasement of Hitler at Munich at once had nothing and everything to do with how America responded to Stalin and his successors in Berlin, Korea, Cuba and Afghanistan.

President Bush wasn’t the only one to conclude that 9/11 had changed the rules of the game. As Sen. John Kerry asked in 2002, “Can we afford to ignore the possibility that Saddam Hussein might accidentally, as well as purposely, allow those weapons to slide off to one group or another in a region where weapons are the currency of trade?”

Note what was taken for granted in his statement – that Saddam Hussein possessed “those weapons,” the kind that killed entire villages in northern Iraq, the kind that deformed generations of Kurds, the kind he hid from the United Nations throughout the 1990s, the kind that can be used to blackmail or checkmate America. “Those weapons” were the ones that even Jacques Chirac and Hans Blix believed Saddam Hussein possessed. “Those weapons” were then, and remain today, the seed of nightmares.

Yet “those weapons” were not the only reason Washington decided to finish the war Saddam began in 1990. In fact, in the Iraq war resolution of 2002, a sizable majority in Congress noted that it had been U.S. policy since 1998 “to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime,” that Iraq posed a threat to U.S. national security by “continuing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations” and that “the attacks on the United States of Sept. 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations.”

In short, there was no bait-and-switch. And if there was, 77 senators and 296 House members were right in the middle of it. Hence, it is disingenuous for so many of them to claim they were tricked into supporting the Iraq war. Simply put, they are too savvy to have been duped into supporting the war – and one hopes their constituents are too savvy to be duped into believing they opposed it all along.

…we stayed too long.

By invading Kuwait in summer 1990, Saddam Hussein left the defenseless Saudis with two options: cut a deal and surrender, or allow the Americans to dig in. The Saudis chose the latter.

Kuwait was ultimately liberated and Saddam Hussein was weakened, but Washington declared a cease-fire before the American juggernaut could destroy key units of the Republican Guard, which were vital to Saddam’s survival.

Deflecting criticisms of the war’s imperfect conclusion in their book “A World Transformed,” the elder Bush and his national security adviser, Brent Scowcroft, argued in 1998 that shutting down the ground war at the hundred-hour mark was the right thing to do. “The United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land,” they concluded.

Of course, that’s effectively what happened, at least in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and his followers. Since a wounded Saddam could not be left unattended and an oil-rich Saudi Arabia could not be left unprotected, U.S. troops took up long-term residence in the Saudi kingdom, a fateful decision that started the clock ticking toward 9/11. As bin Laden himself explained in his oft-quoted 1996 fatwa, his central aim was “to expel the occupying enemy from the country of the two Holy places.”

Put another way, bin Laden’s casus belli was an unintended and unforeseen byproduct of what Saddam Hussein had done in 1990.

The presence of U.S. troops in the land of Mecca and Medina had galvanized al-Qaeda, which carried out the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, which triggered America’s global war on terror, which inevitably led back to Iraq, which is where America finds itself today. In a sense, occupation was inevitable after Desert Storm; perhaps the United States ended up occupying the wrong country.

…we left too early.

If the U.S. presence in Saudi Arabia sparked bin Laden’s global guerrilla war, America’s low threshold for casualties would serve as the fuel to keep it raging.

From bin Laden’s vantage point, America’s retreats from Beirut in the 1980s, Mogadishu in the 1990s and Yemen in 2000 were evidence of weakness. “When tens of your soldiers were killed in minor battles and one American pilot was dragged in the streets of Mogadishu, you left the area carrying disappointment, humiliation, defeat and your dead with you,” he recalled. “The extent of your impotence and weaknesses became very clear. It was a pleasure for the heart of every Muslim and a remedy to the chests of believing nations to see you defeated in the three Islamic cities of Beirut, Aden and Mogadishu.”

Hence, quitting Iraq could have dramatic and disastrous consequences – something like the fall of Saigon, Desert One, and the Beirut and Mogadishu pullouts all rolled into one giant propaganda victory for the enemy. Not only would it leave a nascent democracy unprotected from bin Laden’s henchmen, it would serve to confirm their perception that America is a paper tiger lacking the will to fight or to stand with those who are willing to fight. Who would count on America the next time? For that matter, on whom would America be able to count as the wars of 9/11 continue?

Finally, retreat also would re-energize the enemy and pave the way toward his ultimate goal. Imagine Iraq spawning a Balkan-style ethno-religious war while serving as a Taliban-style springboard for terror. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, al-Qaeda’s top terrorist in Iraq, already has said, “We fight today in Iraq, and tomorrow in the land of the two Holy Places, and after there the West.”

Without question, America finds itself on the horns of a dilemma: to leave Iraq too early will invigorate the enemy; to stay on will only irritate the Iraqi people. But neither path will bring about an end to terror’s war on America. As one al-Qaeda leader puts it, “the mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq.”

Peering over the horizon of history, President Bush has concluded it is better for U.S. troops to stand and fight than for America to run and hide: “We must recognize Iraq as the central front in our war against the terrorists.”

Or perhaps better said, we must remember what we have forgotten on the long road between 9/11 and today.

Alan W. Dowd is a senior fellow at Sagamore Institute for Policy Research.