As ever, Charles Krauthammer gets to the point. The 9/11 report, along with other sources, suggests that there was an al Qaeda/Iran axis. Aha, say the appeaseniks -- Bush invaded the wrong country! Bullseye! But as Krauthammer says, the conclusion they would draw from that is not the one they should draw, that Iran is an unconscionable threat to us all, and that its open and obvious dash to equip itself with nuclear weapons must be stopped as a matter of urgency. The appeasenik response to such a threat is -- to do nothing about it. As he says:

'We know the central foreign policy principle of Bush critics: multilateralism. John Kerry and the Democrats have said it a hundred times: The source of our troubles is President Bush's insistence on "going it alone." They promise to "rejoin the community of nations" and "work with our allies." Well, that happens to be exactly what we have been doing regarding Iran. And the policy is an abject failure. The Bush administration, having decided that invading one axis-of-evil country was about as much as either the military or the country can bear, has gone multilateral on Iran, precisely what the Democrats advocate. Washington delegated the issue to a committee of three -- the foreign ministers of Britain, France and Germany -- that has been meeting with the Iranians to get them to shut down their nuclear program.

'The result? They have been led by the nose. Iran is caught red-handed with illegally enriched uranium, and the Tehran Three prevail upon the Bush administration to do nothing while they persuade the mullahs to act nice. Therefore, we do not go to the U.N. Security Council to declare Iran in violation of the Non-Proliferation Treaty. We do not impose sanctions. We do not begin squeezing Iran to give up its nuclear program. Instead, we give Iran more time to swoon before the persuasive powers of "Jack of Tehran" -- British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw -- until finally, humiliatingly, Iran announces that it will resume enriching uranium and that nothing will prevent it from becoming a member of the "nuclear club." '

In other words, the appeaseniks are working themselves into a lather about how appalling it was to have gone to war against one insupportable threat because they want to not go to war against two.

Whoa, they riposte -- if Iran was in league with al Qaeda, then Iraq couldn't have been because Iran and Iraq are sworn enemies and as we all know by now, the Shia aren't on speakers with the Sunni and vice versa and al Qaeda is Sunni. This is one of the most egregious mistakes of all. For alliances of expediency are always being made in the interests of defeating a common enemy, as comrade Stalin and Herr Ribbentrop so graphically demonstrated.

And there is plenty of circumstantial evidence that Saddam and bin Laden understood this. Although the 9/11 Commission says there was no evidence of a 'collaborative operational relationship' between the two, it details repeated contacts between them, as did the Senate and Butler reports. It is possible, of course, that they merely sniffed round each other. But it is unlikely they would have met so repeatedly without some tangible gain. Given that bin Laden was, these reports tell us, desperate to lay his hands on WMD and Saddam was developing the stuff, and given Saddam's role as the sugar-daddy of terror without footprints, it is surely reasonable to suppose that these links were indeed as productive as they were concealed. And as the CIA's Counter-Terrorism Centre observed: 'any indication of a relationship between these two hostile elements could carry great dangers to the United States.'

The 9/11 Commission itself acknowledged the reality of Islamist cross-sectarian alliances. As it says:

'Bin Ladin seemed willing to include in the confederation terrorists from almost every corner of the Muslim world... Turabi [the then leader of Sudan] sought to persuade Shiites and Sunnis to put aside their divisions and join against the common enemy. In late 1991 or 1992, discussions in Sudan between al Qaeda and Iranian operatives led to an informal agreement to cooperate in providing support—even if only training—for actions carried out primarily against Israel and the United States. Not long afterward, senior al Qaeda operatives and trainers traveled to Iran to receive training in explosives. In the fall of 1993, another such delegation went to the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon for further training in explosives as well as in intelligence and security.

'The relationship between al Qaeda and Iran demonstrated that Sunni-Shia divisions did not necessarily pose an insurmountable barrier to cooperation in terrorist operations...Bin Ladin was also willing to explore possibilities for cooperation with Iraq, even though Iraq’s dictator, Saddam Hussein, had never had an Islamist agenda—save for his opportunistic pose as a defender of the faithful against “Crusaders” during the Gulf War of 1991. Moreover, Bin Ladin had in fact been sponsoring anti-Saddam Islamists in Iraqi Kurdistan, and sought to attract them into his Islamic army...

'To protect his own ties with Iraq,Turabi reportedly brokered an agreement that Bin Ladin would stop supporting activities against Saddam. Bin Ladin apparently honored this pledge, at least for a time, although he continued to aid a group of Islamist extremists operating in part of Iraq (Kurdistan) outside of Baghdad’s control. In the late 1990s, these extremist groups suffered major defeats by Kurdish forces. In 2001, with Bin Ladin’s help they re-formed into an organization called Ansar al Islam. There are indications that by then the Iraqi regime tolerated and may even have helped Ansar al Islam against the common Kurdish enemy... With the Sudanese regime acting as intermediary, Bin Ladin himself met with a senior Iraqi intelligence officer in Khartoum in late 1994 or early 1995. Bin Ladin is said to have asked for space to establish training camps, as well as assistance in procuring weapons, but there is no evidence that Iraq responded to this request. As described below, the ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections.'

The fact remains that the 'axis of evil' was and is a reality, and all its constituent parts need to be dealt with. But whatever the evidence of the danger these states pose to the west (and let us not forget that at the beginning the appeasenik tendency did not disagree that Saddam was a threat, merely that they thought he should be allowed to pull the wool over the eyes of the world indefinitely) the appeasenik line is that we should all continue to dance to their tune. What remains to be see is whether a second Bush term would take on Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, or whether the poisonous political legacy of Iraq has fatally hollowed out such aspirations to create a new and better world order.

Posted by melanie at July 23, 2004