Spinning Saddam's So-Called Links to al-Qaeda

After prolonged bureaucratic labor the latest report of the Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) finally made it out to the larger world. Its primary conclusion, which has been making headlines since news of it was first reported March 10 by Warren Strobel of McClatchey Newspapers, is that an exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents and several thousand hours of audio and video footage, archived in a U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) database called Harmony, that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion, has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda terrorist network.

The IPP is a research effort conducted by United States Joint Forces Command (JFC) focusing on Operation Iraqi Freedom. Its latest study, titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents," was produced by analysts at the Institute for Defense Analyses, a federally-funded military think tank. The report is actually composed of five volumes: the first volume, 94 pages, lays out the overview and conclusions, and the remaining four volumes include about two thousand pages of captured Iraqi documents, declassified and translated into English.

Although the report was actually completed last November and officially released on March 13, the Pentagon declined to publish it online. Instead the Joint Forces Command said on its website that those interested could contact it for a CD containing the report. The full study is now posted on the Federation of American Scientists website.

Predictably, neoconservative publications such as the Weekly Standard have published selected portions of the report, claiming it reflects "widespread journalistic negligence" and does not reflect "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism." To try and vindicate old Bush administration claims that there were links between Iraq and al-Qaeda the Standard noted, "Saddam supported groups that either associated directly with al Qaeda (such as the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, led at one time by bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri) or that generally shared al Qaeda's stated goals and objectives." But the study itself is far more nuanced. It says, in the second paragraph of the executive summary:

But the relationships between Iraq and the groups advocating radical pan-Islamic doctrines are much more complex. This study found no "smoking gun" (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda. Saddam's interest in, and support for, non-state actors was spread across a variety of revolutionary, liberation, nationalist, and Islamic terrorist organizations. Some in the regime recognized the potential high internal and external costs of maintaining relationships with radical Islamic groups, yet they concluded that in some cases, the benefits of association outweighed the risks.

The study does note on page 34 that Saddam Hussein's regime was willing to co-opt or support organizations it knew to be part of al-Qaeda -- as long as that organization's near-term goals supported Saddam's long-term vision. The report notes that from the beginning of his rise to power, one of Saddam's major objectives was to shift the regional balance of power favorably toward Iraq. After the 1991 Gulf War, pursuing this objective "motivated Saddam and his regime to increase their cooperation with -- and attempts to manipulate -- Islamic fundamentalists and related terrorist organizations. Documents indicate that the regime's use of terrorism was standard practice, although not always successful."

The study's primary conclusion should come as no surprise to any serious scholar of Iraq. Saddam Hussein's regime was always relentlessly secular. The Baath party, after all, was founded (or co-founded) by a Christian, and its ideology was pan-Arab and nationalist, the opposite of the religious posture espoused by al-Qaeda.