Campaign '08: In blaming America first for al-Qaida in Iraq's presence, Barack Obama shows the difference between being glib and being articulate and just why John McCain should be president of the United States.
It was as if Neville Chamberlain was blaming World War II on Winston Churchill, or if someone had claimed Hitler wouldn't have invaded France if the British hadn't put their expeditionary force there first.
In an incredible long-distance exchange with McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, Sen. Obama first states that he would send soldiers back to Iraq "if al-Qaida is forming a base in Iraq."
When McCain responded that "al-Qaida in Iraq" has that name because it is already there, Obama replied that there was "no such thing as al-Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq."
Slick Willie, meet slicker Barack, who is blissfully unaware that terrorists hate us for what we are, not what we do.
There are many reasons why we liberated Iraq, and John McCain whispering in George Bush's ear was not one of them. We did not "invade" Iraq. We went in under authority of U.N. Resolution 1441, which gave Saddam Hussein a "final opportunity" to give a full accounting of what happened to the WMD that the mass murderer used against his neighbors and own people, or there would be "serious consequences." Saddam didn't, and there were.
We're sure Obama would rather have used some "aggressive personal diplomacy," as he so glibly puts it, on Saddam. His policy would be to bomb an ally such as Pakistan while talking to a soon-to-be nuclear adversary such as Iran.
And as long as Obama's borrowing phraseology from other politicians, we're surprised he hasn't paraphrased the words of the late William Borah, whom he rivals in naivete.
On hearing of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the Idaho senator lamented: "Lord, if only I could have talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided."
Ah, if only Barack had been able to talk with Saddam . . .
Whether we're talking about Saddam's Iraq, al-Qaida, or other states and terrorist groups, the fact is that they were and are linked by a common enemy and goal — they want the U.S. destroyed. They are allies as much as Germany, Japan and Italy were allies in World War II. They may not coordinate every jot and tittle of their efforts, but the enemy of their enemy is their friend.
That there were links was confirmed by Lee Hamilton, vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who said that the commission did not disagree with the administration's assertion that there were connections between al-Qaida and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Added Thomas Kean, commission chairman: "There were contacts between Iraq and al-Qaida, a number of them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely there."
Indeed there were. For example, Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al-Qaida cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, found safe haven in Iraq, and documents recently found in Tikrit indicate that Saddam provided Yasin with both a home and a salary. Why?
Back in 1999, ABC News reported that Saddam had offered bin Laden asylum, citing their "long relationship" and a December 1998 meeting in Afghanistan between Osama and Iraqi intelligence chief Faruq Hijazi. And so on, and so on.
In 1998, the Clinton Justice Department alleged in an indictment against bin Laden that "al-Qaida reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida would work cooperatively with the government of Iraq."
As the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes has reported, reams of captured documents show that elite Iraqi military units trained some 8,000 al-Qaida terrorists. They belonged to groups such as Algeria's GSPC, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam and the Sudanese Liberation Army, at camps in Samarra, in Ramadi and at Salman Pak, where a Boeing 707 fuselage was used for terrorist training.
Perhaps Obama has an explanation for Iraqi intelligence operative Ahmed Hikmat Shaker helping one of the 9/11 hijackers get to Malaysia and attending the Kuala Lumpur meeting in January 2000 with two of the hijackers, a meeting roundly acknowledged to be the initial 9/11 planning session.
The charge that our liberation of Iraq has caused terrorists to flock to Iraq disproves Obama's own argument that Iraq is not central to the war on terror. Better they flock to Iraq to be killed by American and Iraqi troops than flock to a Pittsburgh or Detroit to execute plans to kill Americans here.
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