Daft Rudy
I was listening to NPR’s ‘Morning Edition’ recently when they played an excerpt from the most recent debate of GOP presidential hopefuls. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani was saying that he could not imagine pursuing the war on terror and leaving Saddam Hussein in power in Iraq. It struck me that Mr Giuliani doesn’t have much of an imagination.
Despite the Bush administration’s propaganda, notably Dick Cheney’s flights into the fantasy of a Saddam-Osama bin-Ladin connection, we know now with virtual certainty that Saddam’s secular Iraq had no operational relationship with Osama and al-Qaida; indeed, a relationship of any sort would defy logic. The Islamic extremists hated Saddam almost as much as they despise the United States. Saddam in turn had ruthlessly hunted down Islamic fundamentalists in his own country as he did anyone who could pose even the most tenuous of threats to his rule. And it would make no sense for Saddam to give the US a pretext for his overthrow by helping al-Qaida with training, weapons and money. In short, Saddam had little to gain and everything to lose by co-operating with al-Qaida.
The reality in post-Saddam Iraq is quite different. After blowing the lid off in Iraq we released not freedom but chaos. In that environment an al-Qaida affiliate has established and flourished; the war itself has served as a rallying cry and recruiting tool both for the larger al-Qaida organization (safely and securely ensconced in the Afghanistan-Pakistan Pashtun border region) and its affiliate in Iraq; it has served as a very effective training ground for Islamic terrorists to utilize their battlefield skills and tactical acumen for use elsewhere in the Middle East; it has even stimulated weapons research and development for guerrillas fighting conventional mobile armoured forces such as in the use of increasingly effective improvised explosive devices; and it has bogged down the major part of our ground forces in a front on the war on Islamic terrorists that didn’t exist before our invasion. Meanwhile a rejuvenated Taliban challenges us once again in Afghanistan, albeit here at least we have the support of our NATO allies.
The brutal and unvarnished truth is that however much of a tyrant he was, Saddam Hussein was, ironically, a bulwark against Islamic extremism and al-Qaida in the Middle East. One can make the argument that it was the moral thing to do to remove such a cruel and inhumane ruler regardless of the consequences; but no reasonable, thinking person (and this would exclude both Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, stuck in their 1970’s-era time warped obsession with state-sponsored terrorism) can argue that invading Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein struck a blow against al-Qaida or Islamic terrorism in general. And if Giuliani and the rest of the singularly unimpressive GOP presidential field really believe differently (as all but one of them apparently do), they’re no more fit to lead this nation than George W Bush.
One thing this nation does not need is to replace one clueless president with another.
