Where to Now?
Coming battles in the War on Terror
Saddam successfully manipulated the Clinton administration and the United Nations out of inspecting his programs for biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. And there is considerable evidence that Iraq was involved in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. When the Sandinistas were defeated in the 1990 election, it was discovered that thousands of Nicaraguan passports were unaccounted for. Many of these Nicaraguan passports, left behind by Iraqi forces in their haste to escape American forces at the end of the Gulf War, turned up in Kuwait in 1991. Five of the passports were on the person of one of the principal plotters when he was arrested in New York in 1993.
However, there is as yet little evidence that Iraq is involved in the present al Qaeda campaign against America. Unless it can be shown that Iraq is playing a central role, which it may be, taking on Saddam would be a distraction from the complex task of rolling up al Qaeda around the globe.
Former Senator Gary Hart, the pro-war chairman of the U.S. Commission on National Security, which predicted major terrorist attacks in America, notes, ”Those who advocate ‘going after’ Saddam never answer two vital questions: 1) how; 2) at what cost? If the commandoassassination option worked, the Mossad [Israeli intelligence] would have done it years ago; Iraq is not Afghanistan. Although there are military targets, the principal target is Hussein. Whereas there are mountain tunnels in Afghanistan, there are urban tunnels in Baghdad. Bombing could result in tens of thousands of civilian casualties without achieving the desired result.“
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