In his Weekly Standard article about the secret document detailing evidence of cooperation between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden Stephen Hayes brings up an issue that detractors have used to suggest the impossibility of such a link. They claim that the two groups, one a secular totalitarian movement, and the other a religiously devout totalitarian movement, had fundamentally irreconcilable interests. Well, they may have had conflicting interests, but surely not irreconcilable. It would not have been the first time totalitarian movements with different sires formed what amounted to a "nonaggression pact." Hayes says:
A decisive moment in the budding relationship came in 1993, when bin Laden faced internal resistance to his cooperation with Saddam.5. A CIA report from a contact with good access, some of whose reporting has been corroborated, said that certain elements in the "Islamic Army" of bin Laden were against the secular regime of Saddam. Overriding the internal factional strife that was developing, bin Laden came to an "understanding" with Saddam that the Islamic Army would no longer support anti-Saddam activities. According to sensitive reporting released in U.S. court documents during the African Embassy trial, in 1993 bin Laden reached an "understanding" with Saddam under which he (bin Laden) forbade al Qaeda operations to be mounted against the Iraqi leader.
Although Hayes says that this agreement came at a decisive moment, the intelligence reference doesn't really deal with internal resistance within Al Qaeda except to say that bin Laden overrode that resistance. What the passage deals with is the reconciliation of conflicting interest between Saddam and the Islamists, in which the Islamists were mollified. For his part Saddam had made similar arrangements of opportunity with other even more bitter enemies, for instance when he came to an agreement in 1996 with the very Kurds that he had gassed at Halabja (the Barzani or KDP) so that his Republican Guard could move with impunity against another Kurdish faction (the Talabani or PUK) to drive them out of Erbil (Mackey, p. 311). But this arrangement with bin Laden is deeper, because the common interest involved a far more formidable enemy. Bin Laden actually discusses his thinking on this matter in a directive given his followers as part of his Declaration of War Against the Americans on August 8, 1996:
Ibn Taymiyyah, after mentioning the Moguls (Tatar) and their behavior in changing the law of Allah, stated that: the ultimate aim of pleasing Allah, raising His word, instituting His religion and obeying His messenger (ALLAH'S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM) is to fight the enemy, in every aspects (sic) and in a complete manner; if the danger to the religion from not fighting is greater than that of fighting, then it is a duty to fight them even if the intention of some of the fighter (sic) is not pure i.e., fighting for the sake of leadership (personal gain) or if they do not observe some of the rules and commandments of Islam. To repel the greatest of the two dangers on the expense of the lesser one is an Islamic principle which should be observed. It was the tradition of the Sunnah (Ahlul Sunnah) to join and invade fight (sic) with the righteous and non righteous men. Allah may support this religion by righteous and non righteous people as told by the prophet (ALLAH'S BLESSING AND SALUTATIONS ON HIM).
So here we have something even more substantial than what the Feith memo annex provides, since the memo simply implies an authoritarian stance on the part of bin Laden, without the need for Koranic justification. In what has to be the most famous of all bin Laden pronouncements, his Declaration of War Against the Americans, he specifically provides a religious justification for alliances of the sort that he had already, apparently, established with Saddam. And text of his declaration may also point to other similar alliances of "convenience" with other secular rulers or groups. The declaration directive amounts to an Islamic fundamentalist version of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" principle. And one need not have acquired a transcendent level of social understanding to grasp the implications.
Update: Here are some additional links to blogs that mention this ongoing, almost universally ignored, story:
[The Rantburg link is particularly exhausting exhaustive.]
Stephen F. Hayes (on the DoD response, etc.)
Jack Shafer in Slate
The Whole Thing
Power Line
Opinions Galore
Rantburg
JunkYardBlog
Young Curmudgeon
Josh Marshall
corrente
Wizblog
rumcrook's tavern
Indymedia
Free Republic
Berkeley Square Blog
The American Mind
Sullivan
Josh Chafetz on Oxblog
Captain's Quarters
After reading Mr. Hayes' article, I have a huge question to submit. That being, if the unamed "source of intimate knowledge" was just that, why did this "source" not know of the WTC attack plans and if the "source" DID know of the attack plans and did nothing, why is he/she not hung already.
Posted by: Richard Rich at November 25, 2003 06:33 PMRichard:
After reading Mr. Hayes' article, I have a huge question to submit. That being, if the unamed "source of intimate knowledge" was just that, why did this "source" not know of the WTC attack plans and if the "source" DID know of the attack plans and did nothing, why is he/she not hung already.
I'm not sure I follow your question. "Intimate" doesn't necessarily mean exhaustive or even extensive (just consider what your wife doesn't know about you). And the article says that the source "did not offer information on the substantive talks during the meetings," which means either that he didn't know or that he was providing information on his own terms; in other words not under their direct control.
I'm not sure what you're implying. Either that the information was made up because he didn't happen to give us Bin Laden's hat size, or that we gave a potential mass murderer a pass? Or are you just throwing up a generic smokescreen?
Posted by: Scott (to R.R.) at November 25, 2003 07:25 PM