Saddam & Bin Laden - oil and water

PV Vivekanand

IT has been made more or less clear that there had been no links between Iraq and Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network. It would have been actually surprising if there was any link, given that Bin Laden is a fierce critic of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein but a sympathiser with the suffering of the Iraqi people following the 1991 Gulf war over Kuwait.
Indeed, Baghdad had tried to woo Bin Laden, and even offered him asylum when US threats mounted against him following the 1998 US embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. But, according to Arab intelligence sources, Bin Laden turned down the offer.
Those who knew Bin Laden in Afghanistan in the 90s say that the Yemeni-origin Saudi dissident was highly critical of Saddam for one thing — for inviting American military intervention in the Gulf by invading Kuwait in August 1990.
"Saddam's biggest mistake, Bin Laden used to say, was his invasion of Kuwait without realising that the Americans were waiting for a back-door military entry to the Gulf region," said a Jordanian who knew Bin Laden in the mid-90s in Afghanistan. "The Iraqi move into Kuwait gave the Americans the pretext to come in militarily; look a the situation now'," the Jordanian quoted Bin Laden as saying in reference to the strong US military presence in the Gulf and Washington's post-1991 defence treaties with the countries in the region.
Bin Laden also saw Saddam as a "bad military strategist" and as having committed "a series of military blunders" in the seven-month run-up to the US-led war to liberate Kuwait. "Saddam had many options to avert the war or to make it very costly for the Americans in the event of a war, but he offered himself as a sitting duck until the Americans decided to strike at their convenience," Bin Laden was quoted as saying by the Jordanian.
"Bin Laden also refused to believe that Saddam was becoming a true Muslim when he went on a spree of building mosques and upholding Islamic principles such as banning alcohol in Iraq," he said. "He (Bin Laden) accurately assessed that these moves were politically motivated and efforts to send a message of Saddam's 'firm belief' in Islam to his own people and the Muslim world with a view to gaining Muslim support and sympathy," he added.
At the same time, Bin Laden sympathised with the people of Iraq whom he saw as a victim of the Saddam regime as much as of the US-enforced UN economic sanctions that have sent the Iraqis to absolute poverty despite the country's known oil reserves (11 per cent of the world's proven oil deposits).
"Bin Laden did not want to have anything to do with Saddam since he saw that aligning himself with the Iraqi president was contradictory to what he believed in, and often said that 'I want no share of his sins against his people'," said the Jordanian.
Shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks in the US, Washington said it had evidence to prove that Iraq had a link to the aerial assaults. It said Mohammed Atta, the suspected leader of the hijackers of the planes that were slammed into New York and Washington targets, had met with an Iraqi diplomat in the Prague in early 2001.
That purported meeting was the only "evidence" cited by the US in its effort to link Iraq with the attacks.
Baghdad has denied that such a meeting took place. Western as well as Arab intelligence sources believe that even if it was true that Atta had a one-time meeting with an Iraqi diplomat there was nothing since then to indicate continued contacts or any other evidence to show that there was an Iraqi role in the Sept. 11 events.
Britain said there was no evidence linking Iraq to the attacks. France and Germany have warned the US against expanding the war against terrorism beyond the borders of Afghanistan.
It is against this background that US President George W. Bush said on Monday that his definition of the war against international terrorism included countries which "develop weapons of mass destruction to terrorise" others and warned Saddam that "he'll find out" the consequences if he refused to allow UN inspectors to verify his country's weapons programme.
Predictably, Baghdad has scoffed at the demand and reiterated its stand that UN inspectors were welcome only after the crippling UN sanctions were lifted totally.
Arab leaders have warned that any US military action against Iraq — whether in name of fighting international terrorism or in the name of Saddam's non-existent weapons of mass destruction — would be destablising to the region, a warning that Bush could ill afford to ignore. But, it is not likely that the US president, whose agenda is dictated by his pro-Israeli advisers and strategists, would take note of the warning.