mheslep said:
About my statement that a police state is not easy to enter?
No, about your assertion that it would have been hard for Zarqawi to enter Iraqi Kurdistan in 2002 without Saddam's help.
In part common sense, http://slate.msn.com/id/2108636/" that travel there for another:
How can you take that article seriously when Hitchens says things like this:
"To the contrary, I used to have to argue every day with antiwar forces who said that Saddam would be able to liquidate tens of thousands of coalition troops, not to mention many Israelis, with his mighty arsenal."
That's just a silly strawman ruse. Who cares if Hitchens argued every day with uninformed idiots?
And the argument about about Zarqawi needing Saddam's help to enter Kurdistan is just as specious. Please! Zarqawi wasn't exactly applying for an Iraqi visa at a consular office. He likely crossed the Kurd controlled border with Iran. He would probably have had to worry more about getting caught by Kurds than by Baathists.
Yes. And Zarqawi left Afghanistan, traveling eventually to Iraqi Kurdistan to start killing Kurds, something that would make the Bathists quite happy, for what reason?
For the possible reason that Ansar, being a Sunni/Wahhabi fundamentalist group determined to impose Sharia rule was ideally aligned with his philosophy? You've got a better
speculation?
I have little interest in rehashing again at the moment the
post Iraq invasion Senate Intel 2004 and 2006 report details on the scant link between Zarqawi and the Bathists, or how the administration should have done a better job on the intelligence. I was responding to the common 'Aha!, the real reason' revisionist nonsense du jour without sources in this
https://www.physicsforums.com/showthread.php?p=2206502#post2206502", presenting the fact that Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war *, and that is indisputably part of public record (Powell's UN speech) that terrorists like Zarqawi in Iraq were a reason articulated for the war.
Saying that terrorists were in Iraq and even saying that a lot of these terrorists were directly supported by Saddam is trivially true (Saddam was pretty public and vocal in his support) but misses the nuance involved in establishing this one specific relationship. For one thing Saddam's support was primarily for Palestinian jihadists like Abu Nidal (who, like Saddam, and unlike Zarqawi, was a secular militant). And secondly, he preferred to support them after they were dead (by offering rewards to the families of martyred suicide bombers). He wasn't really crazy about letting big mercenary terror organizations thrive inside Iraq (and let's not forget it was almost certainly Saddam that had Abu Nidal killed). But all that is only tangential to the issue, which is the importance of the intel behind Zarqawi.
The Joint Resolution by Congress specifically gave permission to invade any nation "
who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations", so it was important that the White House make the case that Saddam's Iraq had harbored a person or organization that was responsible for 9/11. That was the importance of Zarqawi - he came closest to fitting this description. But to make this case, they first had to dress him up as al Qaeda (which he wasn't, though he was funded by them at times and interacted with them regularly), and then produce the photo of him in Saddam's bedroom. But the photo turned out to be more of a painting based partly on intel and partly on speculation.
PS: Would you agree then, that an assertion that arguments about Saddam's links with terrorism were more of hints and hopes, rather than an important part of the case for the war, should just as well qualify as revisionism (if not just ignorance or forgetfulness)?