Dubya is trying to convince Americans that al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda are the same organizations, and backing down in Iraq means another 9/11. I believe the saying is, "that dog won't hunt."
“The facts are that Al Qaeda terrorists killed Americans on 9/11, they’re fighting us in Iraq and across the world and they are plotting to kill Americans here at home again,” Mr. Bush told a contingent of military personnel here (in Charleston, S.C. on Tuesday). “Those who justify withdrawing our troops from Iraq by denying the threat of Al Qaeda in Iraq and its ties to Osama bin Laden ignore the clear consequences of such a retreat.”
Kevin Sullivan, the White House communications director, said the speech was devised as a “surge of facts” meant to rebut critics who say Mr. Bush is trying to rebuild support for the war by linking the Iraq group and the one led by Mr. bin Laden.
But Democratic lawmakers accused Mr. Bush of overstating those ties to provide a basis for continuing the American presence in Iraq. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, said Mr. Bush was “trying to justify claims that have long ago been proven to be misleading.”
The Iraqi group is a homegrown Sunni Arab extremist group with some foreign operatives that has claimed a loose affiliation to Mr. bin Laden’s network, although the precise links are unclear.
In his speech, Mr. Bush did not try to debunk the fact — repeated by Mr. Reid — that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia did not exist until after the United States invasion in 2003 and has flourished since.
His comments also reflected a subtle shift from his recent flat assertion that, “The same folks that are bombing innocent people in Iraq were the ones who attacked us in America on Sept. 11.”
The overall thrust of the speech was that the administration believes that Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia has enough connections to Mr. bin Laden’s group to be considered the same threat, that its ultimate goal is to strike America and that to think otherwise is “like watching a man walk into a bank with a mask and a gun and saying he’s probably just there to cash a check.”
Mr. Bush referred throughout his speech to what his aides said was newly declassified intelligence in his effort to link Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and the central Qaeda leadership that is believed to be operating from the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region. Although the aides said the intelligence was declassified, White House and intelligence officials declined to provide any detail on the reports Mr. Bush cited.
Salon did an interview, published July 19, with Buzzy Krongard, the CIA's executive director between 2001 and 2004. Here's what he had to say about al Qaeda and Iraq:
The administration has recently started invoking 9/11 again when talking about the situation in Iraq. Are there really any connections, based on your experience in the CIA between 1998 and 2004?
I [left] the agency at a time when we were adamant on the subject that there was no institutional connection. Now, does that mean, did somebody from al-Qaida know somebody from Iraq? I'm sure they did. But there was no institutional contact, point one. Point two, who is al-Qaida? I mean, people talk about al-Qaida like it's the New York football Giants, you know? As if it has a certain number of people on the team and they're all identified by height, weight, rank and serial number, all that sort of stuff. Al-Qaida, in my opinion, is an amalgamation, a loose amalgamation of people who share an antipathy to the United States and all Western values. Some of them hate each other, some of them get along, some of them are very, very small splinter groups, but it's not like IBM, with an organizational chart with black lines and chains of command and things like that. That's my opinion. Now, is there someone in this amorphous organization that had some connection to al-Qaida and had some connection with Iraq? I'd say the odds probably say yes, but that's a long way from saying that under Saddam Hussein, the government then in power in Iraq had ongoing sophisticated meaningful dialogue with the hard-core inner-circle leadership of al-Qaida. We never saw anything that showed a linkage there. Period.What about the group now known as al-Qaida in Iraq [also known as al-Qaida in Mesopotamia] and the original al-Qaida organization led by Osama bin Laden? The NIE says al-Qaida in Iraq is the original group's "most visible and capable affiliate."
Once again, it's a lot easier to look at the denominator than the numerator. The denominator is, as I said, the shared hatred of Western values. The numerator -- some of these people, I mean, look, in all parts of the Middle East, these militants are killing each other, aren't they? So I guess some of them are united by a greater hatred of us than of each other, but when nothing's going on they'll kill each other. So it's hard to make that big jump and get to, you know, a smooth running corporate image of al-Qaida. That's for me. Maybe other people see it differently, and I'd be respectful of that.
Is the war in Iraq making the war on terror harder?
Sure. Because while it rages, you cannot help but upset people by virtue of collateral damage, breaking in to their homes, stuff like that. Then you have the propaganda, still, on the other side, and finally you have the resources that are being used, the military function that could otherwise be used in the war on terror.
In Vietnam, the one lesson we were supposed to have learned is that a guerrilla action cannot be sustained without the support of the indigenous population, so it's a scary thing to me that the indigenous population seems to be supporting, in many parts of the country, the activities of the terrorists. That's where the war on terrorism there will be won or lost, because as I said, without the general population supporting them they just can't exist, and thus far it seems to me that they have the support of at least a certain population meaningful enough to do what they've got to do.
Are you optimistic about the U.S. making progress in Iraq?
Tell me what progress we've made.
I guess you don't think we've made progress over the past four years.
I think the military, when they went into Iraq, the military part of the thing was terrific. They did just a super job. I think strong, big mistakes were made, and it made it very difficult for our governmental authorities and the military to function since then. I just think that the things were foreseeable -- disbanding the army and the Baathist party and things like that. We managed to deal with Nazis after World War II. Big mistakes. We did not improve the life of the Iraqis in the sense of water or electricity, the economy, things like that, and we're paying the price for it now.
If you look at the United States, if you take Harlem or Watts and remember when you have a lot of unemployed young men with no ability to earn enough to put bread on the table for their families, stripped of their pride, and you give them all AK-47s and have the mullahs heat 'em up every Friday, what do you expect is going to happen? We had riots in this country when we didn't adequately adjust to social concerns.