Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

Think at your own risk.

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Finally, a serviceable conservative argument linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11

This is about as good as it's gonna get, righties, and interestingly enough, it comes closest to the explanation proferred during this week's GOP debate in South Carolina, by one Ron Paul... From the Hutchinson News, courtesy of an enterprising FReeper:

Many Americans don't understand why the Saudis flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

During Desert Storm, the first President Bush decided to use a containment strategy against Saddam Hussein instead of attempting to remove him from office. This strategy required stationing American troops in Saudi Arabia.

Osama bin Laden and his supporters believed that our troops, which al-Qaida considered to be "infidels," were not only occupying their holy land but desecrating it. They hated us because of the occupation and decided to try to force our troops out.

First they attacked our troops. When that didn't work, they attacked our embassies and the U.S.S. Cole. Bin Laden then decided to declare war on the U.S. by attacking the U.S. directly in what became the 9/11 attack.

The 9/11 attack was the price we paid for allowing Hussein to stay in office instead of attempting to remove him during Desert Storm.

We are now at war with al-Qaida. They are fighting us in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The author is arguing, after this pretty decent start, that we have to stay in Iraq and "fight them over there" so we can protect ourselves from further attacks. That's where the argument begins to fall apart, but let's examine the above part of the argument:

In fact, during and after Desert Shield/Desert Storm under the first President Bush, American troops were in fact staged in Saudi Arabia, at various air bases, most of which were little more than open fields. In the final two years of the Bush I administration, construction began on a massive air base called Al Kharj. According to GlobalSecurity.org:

During Desert Shield, coalition forces found it necessary to build what was then called Al Kharj from scratch. From October 1990 to March 1991, a combined 435-person RED HORSE squadron was involved in more than 25 major projects, valued at more than $14.6 million. These included bedding down the largest air base in theater (in terms of number of aircraft -- capable of bedding down five fighter squadrons) at Al Kharj Air Base. Erecting 17 K-Span facilities and carving out roads, they created a theater munitions storage depot. RED HORSE, augmented by the 4th CES from Seymour Johnson AFB, NC, and contract personnel, hauled 200,000 cubic yards of clay to build a foot-thick clay foundation for tent city. Eventually, they erected a tent city, set up four kitchens, an air transportable hospital, six K-span structures, and support facilities. They built munitions storage areas and bladder berms, completed utility distribution systems, and installed mobile aircraft arresting systems. In less than two months in 1990, Al Kharj changed from a base without buildings and only a ramp and runways, to one with tents to support dining halls, hangars, a hospital, electric power generators, and services for an expanded population of Air Force personnel. Al Kharj was ready for aircraft early in January 1991, and by the beginning of the war was home to 4,900 Air Force personnel.

That massive building effort cannot have gone unnoticed by the recalcitrant Saudi named Osama Bin Laden, who was already smarting from the kingdom of his birth, that his family had devoted its working life to, had turned to the infidels to defend Saudi and Kuwaiti soil, rather than turning to the Jihadis who had expelled the mighty Soviet army from Afghanistan.

When the Clinton administration came into power, and with the tense cease fire remaining with Saddam Hussein's Iraq, the building inside the Saudi kingdom only expanded. by 1995, al-Qaida, or other militant groups being labeled al-Qaida by the U.S. government for housekeeping (and easy messaging) purposes, decided to attack. More from GlobalSecurity:

Attacks on the Office of the Program Manager/Saudi Arabia National Guard (OPM/SANG) in November 1995 and on the Khobar Towers living compound in June 1996 forever changed the way in which the Armed Forces will regard terrorism in the Persian Gulf. Both bombings also served to prove that regional security dynamics can have an impact on US forces deployed in the area. To deter and prevent hostile acts, air activities were moved from King Abd Al-Aziz air base in Dhahran and Riyadh air base to a compound inside a much larger tightly secured, 80-square-mile Royal Saudi Air Force Prince Sultan Air Base adjacent to the city of Al Kharj, south of Riyadh. The rationale for this shift was to move forces from populated areas, where perpetrators of terrorist acts could easily disappear, to locales where space and terrain could be used to advantage.

The expansion of the U.S. and British presence in Saudi Arabia accelerated after that, and the expansion of Prince Sultan Air Base ramped up, such that:

Living conditions for troops at Prince Sultan Air Base took a step forward in late 1998 with the acceptance of the new Friendly Forces Housing Complex, roughly two miles from Prince Sultan Air Base. The new 4,257-bed facility took nearly two years to build and became home in early 1999 to more than 4,000 US, British and French coalition forces involved with Operation Southern Watch. The new housing facility is similar to a college dormitory complex featuring permanent structures and some comforts of home such as shared television and living areas in each apartment. It also has three community dining halls, a gymnasium, recreation center, library, pool and probably the most important feature to the troops -- a lot more privacy. Built at a cost of approximately $112 million by the host government, the housing complex remains the property of the Saudi government but is primarily run and maintained by US forces. Security of the complex is also the responsibility of coalition security forces. The first forces to move in was the 363rd Air Expeditionary Wing already at Prince Sultan.

On 22 June 1999 Prince Sultan Ibn Abdul Aziz, Second Deputy Prime Minister, Minister of Defense and Aviation and Inspector-General, laid the foundation stone for the Prince Sultan Health Center in Al-Kharj. Prince Sultan had donated a total of SR 22 million (U.S. $ 5.87 million) to this project. Prince Sultan also unveiled plaques commemorating the opening of the Prince Sultan Air Base, and marking the completion of the residential complexes and educational facilities, for which Prince Sultan laid the foundation stones a little under two years previously. The project of the Air Base was first conceived in the late 1980s, and had involved ten contractors and total funding of over SR 4 billion (U.S. $ 1.07 billion).

With all that contract money changing hands, and the thousands of U.S. and British troops now living quite well inside the Kingdom, where 30 percent unemployment among the non-royal is a day-to-day fact of life, Bin Laden is said to have made the decision to escalate the war against America. The countdown to 9/11 had begun.

Now all of that assumes that you believe the official timeline and story regarding Bin Laden's designs on the World Trade Center. If you do, then it follows that al-Qaida -- or a loosely defined groups of al-Qaida affiliated entities -- continually ratcheted up the war, attacking the World Trade Center in 1993, two U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, and the World Trade Center again in 2001. Also during that time, a group called Saudi Hizbollah attacked the Khobar Towers housing complex in Saudi Arabia, which at the time was housing military personnel near the headquarters of the Saudi state oil company Aramco (coincidentally, I'm sure). [that the commonality with the other Hizbollah isn't really meaningful, since the name Hizbollah or "Hezbollah" simply translates to "part of God."]

So are we at war in Iraq because of all this? Well, yes and no. Iraq's government had no ties to al-Qaida, which the writer of the Hutchinson essay inherently acknowledges: the al-Qaida beef had nothing to do with America's war against Saddam -- the Saudis, and al-Qaida, both hated Saddam. It had to do with American troops "defiling" Saudi soil to defend Saudi interests aganst Saddam. So it makes no sense to argue that we're fighting an al-Qaida that is on the same side as the Ba'athist apostate Saddam Hussein.

However, there are some al-Qaida elements in Iraq. They represent the smallest, but among the most lethal, components of the insurgency. And what are they fighting for? They're fighting to destabilize the Shiite government and majority, which we unleashed after deposing Saddam. But they appear to want to upend the Ba'athist insurgents, too, setting both sides against one another in a bloody civil war, the result of which, I suppose from al-Qaida's point of view, will be an ungovernable country that cannot be permanently occupied, wait for it, by the infidel Americans and British. So the al-Qaida portion of the war in Iraq is much more about us than it is about Saddam.

So what keeps al-Qaida fighting? Well, it could be that one thing is the fact that their bloody, decade-plus long struggle against the United States has yielded at least one success: On April 29, 2003, the Bush administration announced that it would yield to one of Osama Bin Laden's central demands, by pulling American forces out of the sprawling, hydra-like complex built in the aftermath of his father's aborted war against Saddam: Prince Sultan Air Base.

Labels: George Bush, Iraq, Saddam, Saudi Arabia