Anti-anti-Saddamism

So we didn’t have to go to war against Saddam, and (presumably) shouldn’t have. After all, “the real war on terror” is in Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan. And since the Bush administration, Kerry implies, knew perfectly well that there was no link between the “real” terrorists and Saddam Hussein, it went to war to remove Saddam only “because it want[ed] to.” The New York Times reports, incidentally, that this last line, about the administration “wanting” to go to war, is “one Mr. Kerry has been using with increasing frequency in campaign appearances,” and is one that receives “loud applause.” Why any administration should “want” to fight an unnecessary war Kerry does not explain. Or does Kerry now agree with his colleague Ted Kennedy that the Bush administration went to war because it knew it “was going to be good politically”?

This is surely a major moment in the presidential race. John Kerry had, until last week, been running a disciplined general election campaign, carefully suppressing his left-leaning foreign policy instincts, soberly emphasizing his commitment to fighting the war on terror and to seeing through the effort in Iraq. Then he couldn’t resist the temptation to jump on the (misleading) press accounts of the (sloppy) 9/11 Commission staff report, in order to assault the Bush administration on the issue of terror links between Saddam and al Qaeda.

The Bush administration has fought back. President Bush explained on Thursday, “The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda is because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda.” Vice President Cheney went on television that night to elaborate: “The press wants to run out and say there’s a fundamental split here now between what the president said and what the commission said. . . . And there’s no conflict. What they were addressing was whether or not [Iraqis] were involved in 9/11. And there, [the commission] found no evidence to support that proposition. They did not address the broader question of a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda in other areas, in other ways.” By the end of the day, 9/11 Commission chairman Tom Kean and vice chairman Lee Hamilton were emphasizing that the commission had never said Iraq-al Qaeda links did not exist. Nor, Hamilton explained, did he “disagree” with Cheney’s statement that there were “connections between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s government.” The New York Times, having asserted on Thursday that the commission’s report “challenges Bush,” failed on Friday to report this statement of Hamilton’s.

Now, as Stephen F. Hayes points out elsewhere in this issue, the staff report is an unimpressive document. It is sloppy and contains errors of commission and especially omission. It doesn’t even attempt to deal with the reported presence of an Iraqi official, Ahmed Hikmad Shakir, at a 9/11 planning meeting in Kuala Lumpur in January 2000. It concludes that Mohammed Atta was not in Prague to meet an Iraqi intelligence agent in April 2001, based largely on the fact that his cell phone was used in the United States during those days–even though we know that the plotters shared cell phones among themselves, and that the cell phone in question would have been useless in Europe. (The report says nothing, meanwhile, about Atta’s two unexplained but well-documented trips to Prague the previous year.)

But however blame may be apportioned between the commission’s staff report and the media’s tendentious coverage of it, Kerry has chosen to enter the fray. So we can now have the fundamental debate the country deserves: Does Kerry deny what the Clinton administration consistently maintained, what the Bush administration asserts, and what appears utterly clear–that Saddam Hussein had ties with terrorists and terrorist groups, including al Qaeda? That Saddam “created a permissive environment for terrorism,” as a spokesman for British prime minister Tony Blair put it? No one else denies that the man who mixed the chemicals for the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, Abdul Rahman Yasin, came from and returned to Baghdad, where he lived for the next 10 years. Does Kerry? Does he think Saddam’s terrorist ties were so negligible that we could confidently pursue a war on terror without dealing with Iraq? Did the Bush administration simply “want” to go to war in Iraq, as opposed to believing it had a responsibility and duty to do so?

Furthermore: If Kerry had known in October 2002 when he voted to authorize that war what he now knows, would he have voted differently? Does he believe we would have been better off confining the “war on terror” to Afghanistan and northwest Pakistan? Does Kerry disagree with the conclusion of his fellow Democrat, Joe Lieberman, who argued last week that “to call the war in Iraq separate and distinct from the larger war on terrorism is inaccurate. Iraq today is a battle–a crucial battle–in the global war on terrorism”?

Given the 9/11 Commission’s account of ties between (Sunni) al Qaeda and (Shia) Hezbollah, and what we now know of A.Q. Khan’s nuclear proliferation network that encompassed Sunni, Shia, secular Islamic, and non-Islamic states, wasn’t Bush more right than wrong to speak of an “axis of evil” and a network of rogue states and terrorist groups? And, finally: What really is Kerry’s view of the war against Saddam? Leave aside all the nonsense about a “rush to war.” Does John Kerry now believe we would have been better off to have left Saddam in power in Iraq?

Kerry has tried to avoid directly answering this question. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that he believes the answer is yes. That doesn’t mean Kerry is pro-Saddam. It does mean that he is anti-anti-Saddam. And it means that, if John Kerry had been president, Saddam Hussein would still be in power. Suddenly, last week, the choice and the stakes in the presidential race became clearer.

—William Kristol