ENEMIES TOGETHER. CLINTON WAS RIGHT: SADDAM AND AL QAEDA HAD NUMEROUS CONNECTIONS.

 Artículo de ROBERT L. POLLOCK  en “The Wall Street Journal” del 22/06/2004

Por su interés y relevancia, he seleccionado el artículo que sigue para incluirlo en este sitio web. (L. B.-B.)

Last fall I spoke on a panel at a Washington think tank. The topic was Iraq, and the moderator wanted my reaction to what he termed Americans' "misperceptions" about the war. Among those he cited was a poll showing that 48% of Americans believed there had been a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda.

I responded by saying that the American people were perhaps wiser than the pundits who mock them. But hadn't President Bush just said there was no link? No, I replied, he had said that there was no evidence, so far, of a link between Iraq and 9/11, which was a very different thing. At least one of the audience members whose minds I didn't succeed in changing serves on the staff of the 9/11 Commission, which last week released an interim report attempting to muddle the same issue.

Editorialists and headline writers seized on the report as evidence that the Bush administration had exaggerated the Iraq-al Qaeda link. Some even demanded an apology. They didn't get one. "The reason I keep insisting that there was a relationship between Iraq and Saddam and al Qaeda," the president responded, is "because there was a relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda."

A reader wanting to make sense of all this couldn't do better than Stephen Hayes's "The Connection." In this balanced and careful account, Mr. Hayes describes dangerous liaisons so numerous that, it is clear, leaving Saddam in power was not a responsible option after 9/11. Mr. Hayes also shows how most Democrats and much of the Washington media and foreign-policy establishment have studiously avoided the evidence of such ties, lest they be forced to concede a justification for what they'd rather write off as Mr. Bush's war.

It is often claimed that the "secular" Saddam would never have worked with the fundamentalist Osama bin Laden, and vice versa. But Mr. Hayes shows how Saddam increasingly turned to Islam as a legitimizing force for his regime--adding, for example, allahu akhbar ("God is great") to the Iraqi flag. In any case, Saddam and bin Laden found mutual hatred of the U.S. reason enough for an extensive array of contacts stretching over a decade. These include, among much else, Saddam's sending emissaries to bin Laden when the terrorist was holed up in Sudan and later in Afghanistan. Far from exaggerating the evidence linking Iraq and al Qaeda, the Bush administration has soft-pedaled two of the most suggestive connections between Saddam's regime and the 9/11 plot itself.

One of these goes by the name of Ahmed Hikmat Shakir and is the subject of Mr. Hayes's first chapter. On Jan. 5, 2000, the Iraqi was photographed welcoming one Khalid al Mihdhar to the airport in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Shakir, it is true, was employed as an airport "greeter." But he then proceeded to hop into a car with Mihdhar and drive to a condo owned by a known al Qaeda associate. The CIA would later conclude that over the following three days al Qaeda planned the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole and the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Also believed to have been present were Nawaf al Hazmi and Ramzi bin al Shibh. Mihdhar and al Hazmi were both 9/11 hijackers. Bin al Shibh later boasted of being "coordinator of the Holy Tuesday operation."

Shakir told associates that he had obtained his airport job via connections at Iraq's Malaysian Embassy. It isn't known whether he was present at the January 2000 meeting at the behest of the Iraqi government or as a freelance Islamist. But we appear a bit closer to an answer since Mr. Hayes's book went to press. Last month the Journal's Review & Outlook column broke the news that multiple Iraqi documents now in U.S. custody list someone named Ahmed Hikmat Shakir as having been an officer of the Saddam fedayeen.

Then there's the matter of lead hijacker Mohamed Atta's possible April 2001 meeting in Prague with an Iraqi intelligence agent/diplomat named Ahmed Ibrahim Samir al Ani, who was later expelled from the Czech Republic in connection with a plot to bomb Radio Free Iraq/Radio Free Europe. The establishment media have gone to great lengths to discredit the story, and the 9/11 Commission staff dismisses the possibility on the grounds that someone made calls in the U.S. from Atta's cell phone during the period in question. But the fact remains that Atta undoubtedly visited the Czech Republic under suspicious circumstances in 2000 and that the Czech officials who know best about their surveillance of al Ani stand by their story of a 2001 meeting. As Czech Interior Minister Stanislav Gross put it: "I believe the counterintelligence services more than I believe journalists."

But of course no such explosive links to 9/11 need be shown for one to reasonably conclude that it would have been impossible "to wage a serious Global War on Terror," as Mr. Hayes puts it, "leaving the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in power." Saddam's long history of sheltering terrorists, including Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas--as well as 1993 World Trade Center bomber Abdul Rahman Yassin--is a matter of undisputed public record. So is his funding of Palestinian terror and his attempt to assassinate President George H.W. Bush--not to mention numerous smaller attempts at anti-American terror abroad following the first Gulf War.

Damningly, Mr. Hayes reminds us that Saddam's connections to terrorism and al Qaeda were taken as a given before the 2000 election by both the establishment media and former officials--such as Richard Clarke and Al Gore--who are now at pains to deny them. The connection was even cited in the Clinton administration's 1998 indictment of bin Laden. Surely the former president will want to remind Americans of this fact as he embarks on his book tour.

Mr. Pollock is a senior editorial page writer at The Wall Street Journal.