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| Iraq |
| Hitchens: The Jordanian Connection |
| 2006-06-13 |
| I omitted an important element from my farewell to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in last week's Slate. This is the role played by Jordanian intelligence in the tracking and elimination of one of the Hashemite kingdom's most hardened and experienced enemies. In debates within al-Qaida, Zarqawi was known for his advocacy of concentration on "the near enemy"—regimes, such as Jordan—over the more remote, such as the United States. This was often a distinction without much difference. He took part in a foiled plot to blow up the Radisson and other hotels in Amman in 1999, and he directed the murder of the USAID official Laurence Foley in the same city just before the intervention in Iraq. Most striking of all, he took time off last November to send operatives out of Iraq to blow up three hotels in Amman, killing fifty-odd random civilians, including the members of a Palestinian wedding party. The Jordanian authorities thus had excellent reasons of their own to follow Zarqawi, and the kingdom's Mukhabarat—or General Intelligence Department, which generally earns high marks for efficiency—had been trailing him ever since he left Jordanian soil for Afghanistan, and then Afghan soil for Iraq. It is from this source that we know that Zarqawi was in Baghdad at least as early as June 2002, almost a year before the invasion. Indeed, as the Senate intelligence committee report has confirmed, it was in that month that the G.I.D. contacted the Saddam Hussein regime to "inform" the Iraqis that this very dangerous fellow was on their territory. Given the absolute police-state condition of Iraq at that time, it is in any case impossible to believe that such a person was in town, so to speak, incognito. And remember that in 2002, even states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan were at least ostensibly expelling known al-Qaida members from their turf or else arresting them. Only Saddam's Iraq—which did not reply to the Jordanian messages—was tolerating and encouraging the presence of men who were on the run from Afghanistan. It is customary to dismiss evidence of this kind with a brisk and pseudo-knowing sneer about the "secular" nature of Saddam's regime and thus its presumed incompatibility with theocratic fanatics. Quite how this CIA-sponsored "analysis" has survived this long is beyond me. At least from the time of its conclusion of hostilities with Iran, Baghdad became a center of jihadist propaganda and sponsorship. Saddam himself started to be painted and photographed wearing the robes of an imam. He began a gigantic mosque-building program. He financed the suicide-murderers who worked against the more secular PLO. He sent money to the Muslim separatists in the Philippines. His closest regional ally was the theocracy in Sudan, which had been the host of Osama Bin Laden. (You can see a similar process at work with the other "secular" Baathist regime in Syria: It has long had very warm ties to the mullahs in Iran and to Hezbollah, and in its current and one hopes terminal phase, is forbidding all non-regime propaganda except the Islamist type.) |
| Posted by:tipper |