With all fingers pointing accusingly at arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, some voices wish to remind us that Iraq, too, likely has a large, if not larger, role in the attacks against the U.S. In an article entitled \"Bin Laden Isn\'t Only One to Blame,\" published in the Wall Street Journal on Thursday, Laurie Mylroie, author of \"Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein\'s Unfinished War Against America,\" writes,
\"[Even if] Osama bin Laden was involved in Tuesday\'s terrorist assault... it is extremely unlikely that he acted on his own. It is far more likely that he operated in conjunction with a state - the state with which the U.S. remains at war, namely Iraq. Firstly, bin Laden\'s Afghan-based al-Qaeda organization does not really have the organizational capabilities to carry out such well-coordinated attacks. Someone had to understand how to smuggle weapons through U.S. airport security and which airports and airlines to choose...\"
After bringing several paragraphs of evidence indicating Iraq\'s involvement, Mylroie concludes,
\"It is time to take a new look at the major terrorists acts of terrorism directed against the U.S. in recent years. Are they, perhaps, more complicated than they seem? Indeed, are they acts of war, with all the complexity that wartime activities regularly involve?\"
A compelling article by Dr. Benjamin Zycher, Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, follows this line of reasoning, and writes that much of the problem lies with the U.S. intelligence community\'s point of departure:
\"The facts of this week can be summarized as follows. Notwithstanding a budget of $30 billion or more, our intelligence services, using incredible technological tools of signals intelligence, were able to intercept every false electronic transmission issued by the Iraqis and others, while remaining utterly oblivious to the real plot that actually unfolded... Within minutes, and certainly hours, of the events of Tuesday, our learned intelligence officials began to assure us that Bin Laden is the most likely culprit; but it is wholly unclear as to precisely how this conclusion has emerged, since little or nothing could have been learned in those minutes and hours that was not known before and that could have been examined for veracity...
\"What this means is that the events of this week were orchestrated by a modern state intelligence service, with substantial resources, bureaucratic, expert, and financial, and with the requisite political will and internal controls… The argument that the central responsibility lies instead with an amorphous \"network\" run by a bitter Moslem living in the mountains of Afghanistan is, to be blunt, simply not plausible… Nonetheless, the argument that Bin Laden is the villain, however dubious, will be encouraged in the coming days by the \"discovery\" of an amazing series of false clues pointing to him… planted by the Iraqis. And a substantial part of our intelligence services and public officials will believe them.
\"And that is the core of the problem... As appalling as it is, our intelligence services have evolved intellectually to a point at which they really believe that they cannot be fooled. [But] the interpretation of intelligence requires dispassionate objectivity rather than a bureaucratic need to justify past and future budgets and bureaucratic turf… An intelligence service that genuinely believes that it cannot be fooled, that finds it excruciating bureaucratically and politically ever to admit that it has been fooled, that does not bear adverse consequences when it is fooled, and whose budget rises when abject failure occurs, in reality will be fooled again and again, with horrendous consequences for our people… The Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, must be fired immediately. The head of the CIA counter-terrorism bureau must be fired. The same is true for the head of the Federal Aviation Administration security service, and the head of the FBI counter-terrorism unit...\" He concludes that the correct policy now is to use overwhelming military force to remove Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Baathist regime from power and install Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress in their place.
Arab affairs expert Dr. Yossi Olmert says that though he assumes Bin Laden could not have planned this attack alone, this does not mean that U.S. intelligence is wrong. \"What the U.S. says publicly is not necessarily an indication of what it truly believes,\" he said. \"In my estimation, it\'s very likely that Bin Laden was aided by Iraq or Iran - although Iran is a long-shot, because of the long-standing hostility between the Shiites (Iranians) and the Taliban (Sunnis).\" Arutz-7\'s Yosef Zalmanson asked Olmert if the U.S. plans to include Israel in its international anti-terrorism coalition. Olmert:
\"It will probably be a repeat of the 1991 coalition, in that Israel will not be officially in. But this is OK - as long as the U.S. doesn\'t bother us from fighting our own anti-terrorism war here...\" Olmert further said that U.S. State Secretary Powell\'s statements in favor of a Peres-Arafat meeting should not be overrated.
\"[Even if] Osama bin Laden was involved in Tuesday\'s terrorist assault... it is extremely unlikely that he acted on his own. It is far more likely that he operated in conjunction with a state - the state with which the U.S. remains at war, namely Iraq. Firstly, bin Laden\'s Afghan-based al-Qaeda organization does not really have the organizational capabilities to carry out such well-coordinated attacks. Someone had to understand how to smuggle weapons through U.S. airport security and which airports and airlines to choose...\"
After bringing several paragraphs of evidence indicating Iraq\'s involvement, Mylroie concludes,
\"It is time to take a new look at the major terrorists acts of terrorism directed against the U.S. in recent years. Are they, perhaps, more complicated than they seem? Indeed, are they acts of war, with all the complexity that wartime activities regularly involve?\"
A compelling article by Dr. Benjamin Zycher, Senior Fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, follows this line of reasoning, and writes that much of the problem lies with the U.S. intelligence community\'s point of departure:
\"The facts of this week can be summarized as follows. Notwithstanding a budget of $30 billion or more, our intelligence services, using incredible technological tools of signals intelligence, were able to intercept every false electronic transmission issued by the Iraqis and others, while remaining utterly oblivious to the real plot that actually unfolded... Within minutes, and certainly hours, of the events of Tuesday, our learned intelligence officials began to assure us that Bin Laden is the most likely culprit; but it is wholly unclear as to precisely how this conclusion has emerged, since little or nothing could have been learned in those minutes and hours that was not known before and that could have been examined for veracity...
\"What this means is that the events of this week were orchestrated by a modern state intelligence service, with substantial resources, bureaucratic, expert, and financial, and with the requisite political will and internal controls… The argument that the central responsibility lies instead with an amorphous \"network\" run by a bitter Moslem living in the mountains of Afghanistan is, to be blunt, simply not plausible… Nonetheless, the argument that Bin Laden is the villain, however dubious, will be encouraged in the coming days by the \"discovery\" of an amazing series of false clues pointing to him… planted by the Iraqis. And a substantial part of our intelligence services and public officials will believe them.
\"And that is the core of the problem... As appalling as it is, our intelligence services have evolved intellectually to a point at which they really believe that they cannot be fooled. [But] the interpretation of intelligence requires dispassionate objectivity rather than a bureaucratic need to justify past and future budgets and bureaucratic turf… An intelligence service that genuinely believes that it cannot be fooled, that finds it excruciating bureaucratically and politically ever to admit that it has been fooled, that does not bear adverse consequences when it is fooled, and whose budget rises when abject failure occurs, in reality will be fooled again and again, with horrendous consequences for our people… The Director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, must be fired immediately. The head of the CIA counter-terrorism bureau must be fired. The same is true for the head of the Federal Aviation Administration security service, and the head of the FBI counter-terrorism unit...\" He concludes that the correct policy now is to use overwhelming military force to remove Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi Baathist regime from power and install Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress in their place.
Arab affairs expert Dr. Yossi Olmert says that though he assumes Bin Laden could not have planned this attack alone, this does not mean that U.S. intelligence is wrong. \"What the U.S. says publicly is not necessarily an indication of what it truly believes,\" he said. \"In my estimation, it\'s very likely that Bin Laden was aided by Iraq or Iran - although Iran is a long-shot, because of the long-standing hostility between the Shiites (Iranians) and the Taliban (Sunnis).\" Arutz-7\'s Yosef Zalmanson asked Olmert if the U.S. plans to include Israel in its international anti-terrorism coalition. Olmert:
\"It will probably be a repeat of the 1991 coalition, in that Israel will not be officially in. But this is OK - as long as the U.S. doesn\'t bother us from fighting our own anti-terrorism war here...\" Olmert further said that U.S. State Secretary Powell\'s statements in favor of a Peres-Arafat meeting should not be overrated.