The madness continues to escalate. The British ambsassador to Italy, Sir Ivor Roberts, has been outed for having said: ‘If anyone is ready to celebrate the re-election of Bush it is al-Qaeda’. It rates alongside the infamous remark by the French ambassador to Britain that Israel was a ‘shitty little country’ as a revelation, not so much of one diplomat’s maladroit absence of diplomacy but the corrupted mindset of a country’s foreign policy establishment. Indeed, as the Times reported, the ambassador revealed his true agenda by adding that the Jews were behind it all. The Corriere della Serra 'also quoted the ambassador saying, at the conference near Siena, that the Bush Administration was subject to “conditioning” and “pressure” from Israel and “the Jewish lobby”. '

In normal times, this ripe piece of ancient conspiracy theory and racial prejudice would have created uproar. Now it occasions no remark whatever. Indeed, as far as I could see yesterday it was only reported at all in the Times: other papers reported the al Qaeda barb but left out this contemporary update of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. No doubt that’s because — astonishingly — this demented racial libel is now a commonplace among the so-called cognoscenti, not to mention anyone else. I read and hear it frequently — including from the lips of a distinguished military figure, who confidently told me that Rupert Murdoch had personally decreed that the Times should severely restrict the number of pieces opposing the war in Iraq ‘having been told to issue such an order by the Jewish lobby in America’ -- oh, and that one of the main reasons President Bush had removed Saddam Hussein was because ‘Bush had Ariel Sharon’s hand up his back’. Once upon a time, this kind of comment would never have been made, and if it had been would have consigned the speaker to public opprobrium and contempt. Now you can barely open the Independent, Guardian or even the Times without falling over it, with no protest other than the occasional squeak from Britain’s beleaguered and shell-shocked Jewish community.

But never fear: the media have got a grip on the real story. This has now moved on from the collective screech of ‘Blair lied. Bush lied. People died’, as Mark Steyn puts it. Now the latest cerebrally-challenged group-think is that there was no terrorism in Iraq before the war. As the Guardian leader (which referred to Sir Ivor Roberts’s disgusting comments as merely ‘a diplomatic indiscretion’ and commended him for performing a service to the anti-war lobby) put it yesterday:

‘Mr Blair's comment on Sunday that Iraq is now the "crucible" in which the war on terrorism will be won or lost will infuriate those who have long pointed out that there was no terrorism of this kind in Iraq before the war. Its secular Ba'athist dictatorship had many faults, some of them overlooked or underplayed by critics of the US and British governments, but as the British intelligence services reported consistently, it had no links with the fundamentalist al-Qaida. Mr Blair has often argued that the key issue for him was the possible nexus between WMD and terrorists. But we now know that in February 2003, the joint intelligence committee reported that al-Qaida and associated groups continued to represent "by far the greatest terrorist threat to western interests, and that that threat would be heightened by military action against Iraq". Tragically, the mayhem of the post-Saddam era is fertile ground for the al-Qaida affiliate led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who is threatening the lives of a British engineer and two Americans.’

So Saddam’s regime had ‘many faults’, eh? Steady on there, Guardian! Don’t go overboard! Remember just who is the Great Satan in this story! But of course, to anyone with even a passing acquaintance with reality, the claim that there was no terrorism in Iraq under Saddam is grotesque beyond belief. Saddam’s Iraq was the sine qua non of terrorist states. It tried to murder President Bush’s father. It paid blood money to Palestinian families to turn their children into human bombs. It funded and trained terrorists. It gave shelter to terrorists. Indeed, al Zarqawi was given sanctuary in Iraq for years under Saddam. Terrorists came to Saddam’s Iraq for training in the use of poisons and gases.

As for 'no links between Saddam and al Qaeda’' this is simply a lie. There is no known connection between Iraq and 9/11. But there is overwhelming circumstantial evidence of long-standing links between Saddam’s Iraq and al Qaeda. According to the Senate Intelligence Committee report: ‘The CIA produced 78 reports, from multiple sources, documenting instances on which the Iraqi regime either trained operatives for attacks or dispatched them, to carry out attacks…Iraq continued to participate in terrorist attacks throughout the 1990s…From 1996 to 2003, the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] focused its terrorist activities on western interests, particularly against the US and Israel…throughout 2002, the [Iraqi Intelligence Service] was becoming increasingly aggressive in planning attacks against US interests…. Twelve reports received from sources that the CIA described as having varying reliability cited Iraq or Iraqi national involvement in al Qaeda’s CBW efforts… In March 1998, after bin Laden’s public fatwa against the United States, two al Qaeda members reportedly went to Iraq to meet with Iraq intelligence. In July, an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to met first with the Taliban and then with bin Laden’.

Or this from the September 11 Commission report:

‘With the Sudanese regime acting as intermediary, Bin Ladin himself met with 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… the ensuing years saw additional efforts to establish connections…The Central Intelligence Agency reasonably assessed that there were several likely instances of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda throughout the 1990s, but that these contacts did not add up to an established formal relationship’.

According to Stephen Hayes’s book The Connection, on February 3 1998 bin Laden’s deputy Ayman al Zawahiri met the Iraqi Vice President in Baghdad. ‘The goal of the visit was to arrange for co-ordination between Iraq and bin Laden and establish camps in al-Falluja, an-Nasiriya and Iraqi Kurdistan under the leadership of Abdul Aziz. The visit coincided with a payment of $300,000 from Iraqi intelligence to Zawahiri’s Islamic jihad, which merged that year with al Qaeda…’

A Pentagon memo to the Senate Intelligence Committee revealed: ‘Bin Laden was receiving training on bomb-making from the IIS’s [Iraqi Intelligence Service’s] principal technical expert on making sophisticated explosives, Brigadier Salim al Ahmed. Brigadier Salim was observed at bin Laden’s farm in Khartoum in Sep-Oct 1995 and again in July 1996, in the company of the Director of Iraqi Intelligence, Mani-abd-al-Rashid-al-Tikriti…’

According to Sabah Khodada, a former captain in the Iraq army who worked at the Salman Pak terrorist training camp south of Baghdad, the camp ‘specialised in exporting terrorism to the whole world… they would be trained mainly on assassinations, kidnapping, hijacking of airplanes, hijacking of buses, public buses, hijacking of trains and all other kinds of operations related to terrorism’.

And so on, and on. Now, by its nature not all intelligence stands up to close scrutiny. But there is so much of this it is inconceivable that the general tenor is wrong. Yet the British and American media almost totally ignore it, and state falsely instead that there was no linkage with al Qaeda and no terrorism until the war’s aftermath sucked it in. Wicked, wicked stuff.

Of course, it is undeniable that the current conflagration in Iraq would not have occurred had Saddam not been toppled. It is also obvious that much of this is the direct result of the coalition’s grievous errors after the war. All wars create a vacuum, and unless the good guys fill it immediately the bad guys tend to move in, with disastrous effects. That is exactly what happened in Iraq. As the leaked Whitehall memos revealed last week, Blair’s advisers warned of such an eventuality. But the fact that they warned of a possibility that everyone with half a brain foresaw, and the fact that this tragically came to pass because of the ineptitude of post-war planning, does not mean that the removal of Saddam was not necessary and right. It was. And it does not mean Saddam’s Iraq was not involved in terrorism. The above quotes might usefully be sent to every journalist and newspaper editor who has published or broadcast this untruth in the past few days.

Like, for example, the BBC, which knows for a certainty that the real villain of the piece cannot be Saddam, or his successors in butchery who are now behaving with such barbarism in Iraq. They know instead beyond doubt that it is George W Bush. In a scene setter yesterday on the Today programme (8.33 am) for Bush’s big speech, Justin Webb said (and I paraphrase) the following: that President Bush would be displaying the appeal of the cowboy down the ages and a cowboy philosophy; that what he did well was stand his ground outside the saloon bar, but he didn’t react well when the shooting started; that he intended to say the war was justified even though the main justification of WMD hadn’t turned up; that he would continue to link the war on Iraq with al Qaeda even though there was no evidence that a link previously existed; and that whenever he was asked what mistakes he had made he looked completely shocked.

One of the most sickening features of the current media hysteria is the implication that the appalling atrocities now taking place in Iraq are the fault not of the butchers carrying them out but of Bush and Blair for starting the conflagration. But the reason British and American hostages are being taken and murdered is because the terrorists know that with every such death — and the more barbaric it is — the more the British and American media will not blame them but, obscenely, Blair and Bush and thus ratchet up the pressure upon them to quit Iraq and give up the defence against terror.

This is, indeed, working like a charm. Such is the media conflagration of lies, distortions, moral bankruptcy, prejudice and foaming hatred and hysteria directed at their own side that it becomes less likely by the day that Bush, let alone Blair, will feel able to take on Iran and Syria. Unless he does that, however, not only will Iraq be lost but the west might as well put its hands up now and wave the white flag. The jihadis are playing the west for suckers; and the arrogant, ignorant, bigoted media are playing their part to perfection.

Posted by melanie at September 22, 2004