Ten Years Without Saddam

 

Ten Years Without Saddam

Published on American Spectator 

Ten years after the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, the costs of the war are quite familiar. But in focusing on what was lost, we often lose sight of what was won.
To start with the obvious, Saddam Hussein is gone. That's no small thing. It's not just that Saddam was one of the most vicious mass murderers of his era — though it's important to remember that he was, and that the horror of the past decade in Iraq still hasn't matched his totalitarian regime's body count — it's that his unpredictability made him especially dangerous. That's the flipside to the intelligence failures in the run-up to the war: If it was so hard to tell that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction program was moribund, it would have been just as hard to predict his behavior had he been left in power for the past decade, enriched by the failure of the sanctions regime (remember the bad joke that was Oil-for-Food?) and rising oil prices driven by Chinese and Indian demand. Restarting his WMD program, funding international terrorism, further military adventurism — one could never tell with Saddam.
Some see Saddam Hussein's loss as Iran's gain. Yes, the current Iraqi government's policies tend to be more congenial to the Islamic Republic than Saddam's were, but the picture is more complicated than that. A murderous anti-American loose cannon like Saddam was never an ideal ingredient for a stable balance of power. And because the current government of Iraq isn't an international pariah, oil production is higher now than it has been since before the first Gulf War; with less Iraqi oil on the market, sanctions on Iran would be a much tougher sell in Europe.
Iraq is still a violent place; the Iraqi government is dysfunctional and has grown less genuinely democratic. Elections in Iraq did, as President Bush envisioned, change the politics of the region, but the illiberalism of the people who've thrived at the ballot box has created new challenges. But none of this should make anyone nostalgic for Saddam Hussein.
But the war wasn't just about Saddam Hussein. Iraq became the central front in the war against al Qaeda, and it was the ideal place to open that front. Iraq loomed large in Osama bin Laden's 1998 declaration of war. His first grievance was that "the United States is occupying the lands of Islam in the holiest of its territories, Arabia" — that is, he objected to the Saudis hosting U.S. troops, the linchpin of the policy of containment toward Saddam. Bin Laden's second grievance was that the U.S. had gone to war with Iraq and might do so again. It was natural that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's branch of al Qaeda would meet the U.S. on the battlefield in Iraq. As with the other factions that emerged after the invasion, American policymakers weren't really prepared for this, but, with the course correction that was the surge, eventually managed to deal with it.
Thousands of young men came to Iraq to join Zarqawi's jihad, and died there. If there were no occupation of Iraq, how many would nonetheless have had an enthusiasm for killing Americans? It's likely a nontrivial number who, absent the invasion of Iraq, would have made prime recruits for al Qaeda attacks elsewhere — perhaps on U.S. assets abroad (like the embassies in Kenya and Tanzania or the USS Cole), and perhaps on America itself.
There have been numerous foiled terror plots since 9/11, but the successful major attack that most of us were expecting never came; credit a mixture of good counterterrorism and good luck, but also credit the men and women who lost friends, limbs, and lives taking the fight against al Qaeda to Iraq for making the pool of terrorist recruits smaller and a successful attack less likely. In other words: Yes, the Iraq War made us safer.
The cost in blood, treasure, and U.S. credibility was greater than anyone anticipated. The mistakes along the way were nearly catastrophic. The Iraq War was, no doubt, a Pyrrhic victory. But it was a victory nonetheless.

The Iraq Withdrawal Is Nothing to Brag About

Max Boot: The Iraq Withdrawal Is Nothing to Brag About

If there is one constant of American military history it is that the longer our troops stay in a country the better the prospects of a successful outcome. Think of Germany, Italy, Japan or South Korea. Conversely when U.S. troops rush for the exits hard-won wartime gains can quickly evaporate. Think of the post-Civil War South, post-World War I Germany, post-1933 (and post-1995) Haiti, post-1972 Vietnam, or, more recently, post-1983 Lebanon and post-1993 Somalia.

Keep that history in mind as you listen to President Obama boast: “As promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. After nearly nine years, America’s war in Iraq will be over.”

Far from being cause for celebration, Obama’s announcement that we will keep only 150 U.S. troops in Iraq after the end of the year–down from nearly 50,000 today–represents a shameful failure of American foreign policy that risks undoing all the gains that so many Americans, Iraqis, and other allies have sacrificed so much to achieve. The risks of a catastrophic failure in Iraq now rise appreciably. The Iranian Quds Force must be licking its chops because we are now leaving Iraq essentially defenseless against its machinations. Conversely the broad majority of Iraqis who fear Iranian influence and who want their country to become a democracy will come to rue this day, however big a victory it might appear in the short term for the cause of Iraqi nationalism.

Ostensibly this pull-out was dictated by the unwillingness of Iraqi lawmakers to grant U.S. troops immunity from prosecution. But Iraqi leaders of all parties, save the Sadrists, also clearly signaled their desire to have a sizable American troop contingent post-2011. The issue of immunity could have been finessed if administration lawyers from the Departments of State and Defense had not insisted that Iraq’s parliament would have to vote to grant our troops protections from Iraqi laws. Surely some face-saving formula that would not have needed parliamentary approval could have been negotiated that would have assuaged Iraqi sovereignty concerns while making it unlikely in the extreme that any U.S. soldier would ever go before an Iraqi court for actions taken in the line of duty.

Saddam: What We Now Know - Jim Lacey - National Review Online

Saddam: What We Now Know - Jim Lacey - National Review Online

WikiLeaks memos the mainstream media doesn't want you to read (Wizbang)

WikiLeaks memos the mainstream media doesn't want you to read (Wizbang)
Lots of evidence of WMD.

Those yellowcake blues

From the AP: U.S. removes 'yellowcake' from Iraq - World news - Mideast/N. Africa - Conflict in Iraq - msnbc.com

The last major remnant of Saddam Hussein's nuclear program — a huge stockpile of concentrated natural uranium — reached a Canadian port Saturday to complete a secret U.S. operation that included a two-week airlift from Baghdad and a ship voyage crossing two oceans.

The removal of 550 metric tons of "yellowcake" — the seed material for higher-grade nuclear enrichment — was a significant step toward closing the books on Saddam's nuclear legacy. It also brought relief to U.S. and Iraqi authorities who had worried the cache would reach insurgents or smugglers crossing to Iran to aid its nuclear ambitions.

And, in a symbolic way, the mission linked the current attempts to stabilize Iraq with some of the high-profile claims about Saddam's weapons capabilities in the buildup to the 2003 invasion.

Accusations that Saddam had tried to purchase more yellowcake from the African nation of Niger — and an article by a former U.S. ambassador refuting the claims — led to a wide-ranging probe into Washington leaks that reached high into the Bush administration.

But Abu Ghraib was TRUE evil

(Hat tip: Clayton Cramer)

From February 4, 2009 Pink News, a European gay news service:

Islamic terrorists are raping young men in order to drive them into suicide bombings.

The Sun quotes Algerian militant Abu Baçir El Assimi:

"The sexual act on young recruits aged between 16 to 19 was a means to urge them to commit suicide operations."

The paper claims that "intense social stigma and fear of more gay sex attacks leaves Muslims prepared to die."

Rape and homosexual acts are punishable by death under Sharia law.

A suspected terrorist bomber killed in an attempted attack on a security installation in the Tizi Ouzou province of Algeria last month may have been raped, an autopsy revealed.

On the other hand, if they'd been made to wear underwear on their heads, who knows what they might have been driven to do.

The other shoe drops

Remember the fellow who threw his shoes at President Bush during his last press conference in Iraq? The BBC reported that the fellow was beaten while in custody, suffering broken ribs, a broken arm, and internal bleeding. Now, the AP reports that his injuries, resulting from being wrestled to the floor after throwing his shoes, had healed.

Gateway Pundit quotes Tom W:

An Arab man tossed his shoes at a head of state, and he was not killed; his family was not arrested; the press reported on both sides of the issue; people were allowed to protest in support of the shoe chucker, as is their right; and the Iraqi prime minister did not interfere in the prosecution of the man.

Arabs all over the region have seen that Iraq is now a free country, due to the man who was the target of the shoe throwing.

The shoe chucker did a huge service to President Bush and our troops. He proved definitively that Operation Iraqi Freedom is a success, and the war is won.

Maybe the people in these countries will decide they want some of that freedom.

Have a cow, man!

Or in this case, "Have a cow, woman!"

(Hat tip: Prarie Pundit)

Marines buy cows for Iraqi widows

At the suggestion of an Iraqi women's group, the Marine Corps recently bought 50 cows for 50 Iraqi widows in the farm belt around Fallouja, once the insurgent capital of war-torn Anbar province.

 

The cow purchase is seen as a small step toward reestablishing Iraq's once-thriving dairy industry, as well as a way to help women and children hurt by the frequent failure of the Iraqi government to provide the pensions that Iraqi law promises to widows.

 

The early sign is that the program is working. Widows, many with no other income, have a marketable item to sell, as well as milk for their children. Although Iraqis, particularly women, are often reluctant to participate in an American effort, the cows were immediately popular.

 

 

"It was an easy sell," said Maj. Meredith Brown, assigned to the Marines' outreach program for Iraqi women.

 

The idea, proposed by members of the Women's Cultural Center in Fallouja, at first met with resistance from U.S. military officers and civilian officials involved in aid programs for Anbar. Nothing in their training provided guidance in haggling for livestock.

 

But those objections quickly evaporated when Maj. Gen. John Kelly, the top Marine in Iraq, signaled his support, Brown said. The Iraqis now refer to their animals as Kelly's Cows.

....

The Marines began buying cows in November at a livestock market at Saqlawiyah. Of the 50 cows, 35 were pregnant and 10 already had calves, which went along with their mothers. The five others were taken to a laboratory for artificial insemination. Brown put the program cost so far at $58,000.

 

To qualify for a free cow, each widow had to sign an agreement not to slaughter or sell the animal and instead to use the milk as a marketable item or for the family.

 

The project is not entirely altruistic. The Marines believe that widows with at least some economic resources are less likely to join Al Qaeda to carry out suicide attacks in exchange for a promise that their children will be cared for after the women are gone.

 And what's interesting is the corporate entity involved:

Though Kelly's support may have been based on gut instinct, the need to beef up Iraq's badly broken dairy industry was argued in a Nov. 25 report by Land O'Lakes Inc.

 

The Minnesota cheese-and-butter company was hired by the Marine Corps to examine the Iraqi dairy industry. Its 38-page report, based on field research in the fall by two Land O'Lakes dairy specialists, concluded that there was enormous growth potential for the industry in a milk-drinking, cheese-eating nation that can locally produce enough milk to satisfy only 5% of the demand.

 

The study also pointed out that, even in Iraqi farm families with able-bodied adult males, much of the work is left to women: "Women milk the cows, bring feed and fodder to the animals and are supported by their children."

 

Though Americans know Land O'Lakes best from its products in the dairy case, the company has been involved in 150 development projects in 70 countries in recent decades. Among them was a dairy project in Afghanistan after the Taliban was toppled in the U.S.-led invasion in 2001.

 

Its report cited a litany of woes besetting the Iraqi dairy industry: facilities damaged by war, looting or neglect; a lack of good feed; a dearth of veterinarians and the initiative-numbing effect of three decades of centralized planning under Saddam Hussein.

 

"Every link in the value chain was broken, but we found that every link is fixable," said Zaheer Baber, regional director for Asia and the Middle East for Land O'Lakes' international development division.

We might hear more about these development projects if they fit the narrative of a big, greedy corporation.

The other shoe drops

Attacks in Iraq are down. Down to 5% of their levels last year.

The Iraq murder rate is substantially lower than that in many US cities including Chicago. It is also a demonstration of how ill informed the emotionally immature shoe thrower was. I doubt you will see this kind of stat in stories about his misinformed infantile tantrum. You are also unlikely to see it in the left's commentary embracing his actions.

Shoes fly, don't bother me

The news is full of accounts of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at the President during a press conference. From The Anchoress, I note:

In reading some of the forums, this commenter at Ann Althouse made a spot-on analysis that actually can be broadened.

Harsh Pencil wrote:

The reporter knows deep down that he can throw his shoe at Bush only because of Bush and it shames him. He can't forgive Bush for that.

Yes. Spot-on. And when I read that, I realized Harsh Pencil had articulated the sense I have had, since 2001, that Bush Derangement Syndrome was rooted in shame and fear. I remember reading a Maureen Dowd column written shortly after 9/11 in which she blathered on about no longer being able to occupy her time discussing which nylons she bought (or something like that - I told you, it was blather). While I cannot remember the column clearly, I remember the odd (for then) tone of resentment Dowd expressed in it toward Bush, and at the time I thought:

she is resentful that it is Bush who she must look to for safety, that it is the parental, cowboyish Bush who is protecting her, and not the adolescent Gore.

I'm pretty sure Bush Derangement Syndrome is nothing more than adolescent angst because "their side" did not get to lead and reassure and hold-steady in a time of danger and uncertainty. It's a larger demonstration of Bill Clinton's regret that 9/11 did not happen on his watch, so he could have a chance to be a "great" and wartime president.

But there was no lnk

From Gateway Pundit:

Al-Qaeda leaders were in Iraq in 2002.
How do we know?
Because our agents saw them there
CQ Politics reported:

Media catching up

The media are finally catching up with what Obama's critics have been saying all along.

 

(Gateway Pundit)

 

...Three days after the election.

Yahoo reported:

 

 

Senior U.S. military officials will likely advise Barack Obama to adjust his campaign pledge to withdraw all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by mid-2010. While promising a 16-month timetable for getting all U.S. fighting forces out, Obama repeatedly insisted on what he calls a "responsible" withdrawal. Pulling nearly all U.S. troops and equipment out of Iraq in 16 months is "physically impossible," says a top officer involved in briefing the President-elect on U.S. operations in Iraq. That schedule would create a bottleneck of equipment and troops in the south of Iraq and Kuwait where brigades repair, clean and load vehicles and weapons for the trip home, said the official. Others say U.S. could conceivably pull out on that time scale, although that would require leaving more equipment behind. A more important concern that, officers believe the security gains in Iraq would be put at risk if troops were withdrawn before the Iraqi security forces are in a position to protect their own communities and borders.

The fact that Barack Obama and the democrats were wrong on Iraq did not affect this year's elections.

Thanks to President George W. Bush and the US military Iraq is a successful democracy in in the Middle East.  

Reporters finally admit that Obama is a "creepy deeply manipulative creature."

 

Reminiscent of Genghis Khan?

From Blackfive:

KARMAH, Iraq (September 28, 2008) – Corpsmen are often considered the medical ray of light for Marines in a combat zone.

Sometimes their light shines bright enough to reach local Iraqis in need, whether it is during a routine combined medical engagement, or for one Iraqi child who almost drowned, on the spot emergency medical attention that saved his life.

Navy Chief Roger Buck, a 34-year-old battalion medical chief from Niceville, Fla., with Task Force 1st Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment, Regimental Combat Team 1, saw the limp child cradled in his father's arms during an Iraqi key-leadership, joint-forces dismounted patrol.

Buck ran toward the boy and immediately began administering CPR on the drown victim.

....

Within a few minutes the boy regained consciousness, coughed up water and was taken to a local hospital for follow on care.

....

Buck said he was merely in the right place at the right time and just doing his job, and the look of gratitude and appreciation on the terrified parents was all the thanks he needed.

An Afghan Torturer is interviewed

For reference

In an astonishing interview with Christina Lamb, the Afghan leader's former bodyguard reveals the full brutality of the fundamentalist regime sheltering Osama bin Laden

"YOU must become so notorious for bad things that when you come into an area people will tremble in their sandals. Anyone can do beatings and starve people. I want your unit to find new ways of torture so terrible that the screams will frighten even crows from their nests and if the person survives he will never again have a night's sleep."

These were the instructions of the commandant of the Afghan secret police to his new recruits. For more than three years one of those recruits, Hafiz Sadiqulla Hassani, ruthlessly carried out his orders. But sickened by the atrocities that he was forced to commit, last week he defected to Pakistan, joining a growing number of Taliban officials who are escaping across the border.

Al Qaeda on the run

A year ago, Michael Hayden warned that al-Qaeda had rebounded and presented a critical threat to the United States. Yesterday, he told the Washington Post that AQ and its network had suffered defeats across the board and now faced significantly increased hostility from fellow Muslims. What happened? Three guesses:

...

This all started with the American surge in Iraq. A year ago, AQI had plenty of reason to brag about its operations in Iraq. The US had not fought back effectively against the terrorist network in the western provinces, and they held significant territory. They had subjugated enough of the area to proclaim a new Caliphate and urge recruits to join them in building the Islamic State of Iraq.

Instead, these recruits found out that AQI held these areas only through terrorizing other Muslims, and unfortunately for them, they arrived just when General David Petraeus brought the new counterinsurgency strategies to Iraq. Bolstered by an additional 30,000 troops, Petraeus began to clear Iraq of the terrorist network, along with new tribal alliances and assistance from more secular insurgent groups who belatedly discovered that the Americans were far more preferable than Osama bin Laden’s lunatics. AQI suffered an unending series of losses to the American military, which led to a far more damaging loss of prestige among Islamists.

The increased pace of attacks on Islamist bases in Pakistan has also helped degrade AQ. Several high-level planners have already met their doom via Predator drones, and the pace indicates that the US has received better intel over the last few months than ever before. As long as the attacks continue, the terrorists will find it difficult to maintain effective communications with its cells in other nations.

These gains could still be lost. Hayden warned against a return to the pre-9/11 mindset, saying that complacency could put us back into the same posture that allowed 9/11 to take place. Just as important, though, is to keep pressure where we have succeeded: in Iraq. A premature withdrawal that allows AQI to reform in western Iraq would certainly boost the flagging fortunes of the Osama network and once again provide a major recruitment point.

Hitchens on Iraq

Anyone with even a glancing acquaintance with Iraq would have to know that a heavy U.S. involvement in the affairs of that country began no later than 1968, with the role played by the CIA in the coup that ultimately brought Saddam Hussein's wing of the Baath Party to power. Not much more than a decade later, we come across persuasive evidence that the United States at the very least acquiesced in the Iraqi invasion of Iran, a decision that helped inflict moral and material damage of an order to dwarf anything that has occurred in either country recently. In between, we might note minor episodes such as Henry Kissinger's faux support to Kurdish revolutionaries, encouraging them to believe in American support and then abandoning and betraying them in the most brutal and cynical fashion.

If you can bear to keep watching this flickering newsreel, it will take you all the way up to the moment when Saddam Hussein, too, switches sides and courts Washington, being most in favor in our nation's capital at the precise moment when he is engaged in a campaign of extermination in the northern provinces and retaining this same favor until the very moment when he decides to "engulf" his small Kuwaiti neighbor. In every decision taken subsequent to that, from the decision to recover Kuwait and the decision to leave Saddam in power to the decisions to impose international sanctions on Iraq and the decision to pass the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, stating that long-term coexistence with Saddam's regime was neither possible nor desirable, there was a really quite high level of public participation in our foreign policy. We were never, if we are honest with ourselves, "lied into war." We became steadily more aware that the option was continued collusion with Saddam Hussein or a decision to have done with him. The president's speech to the United Nations on Sept. 12, 2002, laying out the considered case that it was time to face the Iraqi tyrant, too, with this choice, was easily the best speech of his two-term tenure and by far the most misunderstood.

That speech is widely and wrongly believed to have focused on only two aspects of the problem, namely the refusal of Saddam's regime to come into compliance on the resolutions concerning weapons of mass destruction and the involvement of the Baathists with a whole nexus of nihilist and Islamist terror groups. Baghdad's outrageous flouting of the resolutions on compliance (if not necessarily the maintenance of blatant, as opposed to latent, WMD capacity) remains a huge and easily demonstrable breach of international law. The role of Baathist Iraq in forwarding and aiding the merchants of suicide terror actually proves to be deeper and worse, on the latest professional estimate, than most people had ever believed or than the Bush administration had ever suggested.

This is all overshadowed by the unarguable hash that was made of the intervention itself. But I would nonetheless maintain that this incompetence doesn't condemn the enterprise wholesale. A much-wanted war criminal was put on public trial. The Kurdish and Shiite majority was rescued from the ever-present threat of a renewed genocide. A huge, hideous military and party apparatus, directed at internal repression and external aggression was (perhaps overhastily) dismantled. The largest wetlands in the region, habitat of the historic Marsh Arabs, have been largely recuperated. Huge fresh oilfields have been found, including in formerly oil free Sunni provinces, and some important initial investment in them made. Elections have been held, and the outline of a federal system has been proposed as the only alternative to a) a sectarian despotism and b) a sectarian partition and fragmentation. Not unimportantly, a battlefield defeat has been inflicted on al-Qaida and its surrogates, who (not without some Baathist collaboration) had hoped to constitute the successor regime in a failed state and an imploded society. Further afield, a perfectly defensible case can be made that the Syrian Baathists would not have evacuated Lebanon, nor would the Qaddafi gang have turned over Libya's (much higher than anticipated) stock of WMD if not for the ripple effect of the removal of the region's keystone dictatorship.

None of these positive developments took place without a good deal of bungling and cruelty and unintended consequences of their own. I don't know of a satisfactory way of evaluating one against the other any more than I quite know how to balance the disgrace of Abu Ghraib, say, against the digging up of Saddam's immense network of mass graves. There is, however, one position that nobody can honestly hold but that many people try their best to hold. And that is what I call the Bishop Berkeley theory of Iraq, whereby if a country collapses and succumbs to trauma, and it's not our immediate fault or direct responsibility, then it doesn't count, and we are not involved. Nonetheless, the very thing that most repels people when they contemplate Iraq, which is the chaos and misery and fragmentation (and the deliberate intensification and augmentation of all this by the jihadists), invites the inescapable question: What would post-Saddam Iraq have looked like without a coalition presence?

Saddam and Terror

"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." According to the Pentagon study, Egyptian Islamic Jihad was one of many jihadist groups that Iraq's former dictator funded, trained, equipped, and armed.

An abstract that describes the study reads, in part:

Because Saddam's security organizations and Osama bin Laden's terrorist network operated with similar aims (at least in the short term), considerable overlap was inevitable when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the same outside groups. This created both the appearance of and, in some way, a 'de facto' link between the organizations. At times, these organizations would work together in pursuit of shared goals but still maintain their autonomy and independence because of innate caution and mutual distrust. Though the execution of Iraqi terror plots was not always successful, evidence shows that Saddam's use of terrorist tactics and his support for terrorist groups remained strong up until the collapse of the regime."

Among the study's other notable findings:

In 1993, as Osama bin Laden's fighters battled Americans in Somalia, Saddam Hussein personally ordered the formation of an Iraqi terrorist group to join the battle there.

For more than two decades, the Iraqi regime trained non-Iraqi jihadists in training camps throughout Iraq.

According to a 1993 internal Iraqi intelligence memo, the regime was supporting a secret Islamic Palestinian organization dedicated to "armed jihad against the Americans and Western interests."

In the 1990s, Iraq's military intelligence directorate trained and equipped "Sudanese fighters."

In 1998, the Iraqi regime offered "financial and moral support" to a new group of jihadists in Kurdish-controlled northern Iraq.

In 2002, the year before the war began, the Iraqi regime hosted in Iraq a series of 13 conferences for non-Iraqi jihadist groups.

That same year, a branch of the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) issued hundreds of Iraqi passports for known terrorists.

As I said, this ought to be big news. And, in a way, it was. A headline in the New York Times, a cursory item in the Washington Post, and stories on NPR and ABC News reported that the study showed no links between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.

How can a study offering an unprecedented look into the closed regime of a brutal dictator, with over 1,600 pages of "strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism," in the words of its authors, receive a wave-of-the-hand dismissal from America's most prestigious news outlets? All it took was a leak to a gullible reporter, one misleading line in the study's executive summary, a boneheaded Pentagon press office, an incompetent White House, and widespread journalistic negligence.

On Monday, March 10, 2008, Warren P. Strobel, a reporter from the McClatchy News Service first reported that the new Pentagon study was coming. "An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents 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 Qaida terrorist network." McClatchy is a newspaper chain that serves many of America's largest cities. The national security reporters in its Washington bureau have earned a reputation as reliable outlets for anti-Bush administration spin on intelligence. Strobel quoted a "U.S. official familiar with the report" who told him that the search of Iraqi documents yielded no evidence of a "direct operational link" between Iraq and al Qaeda. Strobel used the rest of the article to attempt to demonstrate that this undermined the Bush administration's prewar claims with regard to Iraq and terrorism.

Practical Torture

To obtain an accurate picture of the level of atrocities committed by this band of thugs, it is first necessary to review what the American military rightly calls the "atrocity sites." I saw pictures of the bodies of victims found in these houses showing burned feet, open wounds, cut limbs, dislocated shoulders and joints which were the grisly results of hanging and beating and other horrific methods of torture.

I have researched and spoken with several American military officers concerning these torture houses. Here is a brief description of these houses which were discovered:

• Baquoba, June 2007: Discovery of the first torture house. Victims had drill holes in their bodies and deep gouges caused by blow torches; an Al Qaeda flag was in the torture house; many of the torture wounds were in the bottom of the feet of the victims. Torture equipment included: Drills, blow torches, chains hanging from the walls and ceiling, blood trails, saws, drills, knives, weapons, masks, and handcuffs. An execution site outside of building where Iraqi victims were lined up and shot.

• Khan Bani Saad, August 2007: Discovery of rooms filled with torture tools and murdered Iraqi victims.

• Arab Jibour, near Dora, south of Baghdad, August 2007: Blood splattered on the walls. Piles of corpses found outside the house.

• Tarmiyya, September 2007: Nine prisoners were freed; many victims had been chained in place.

• Muqdadiyah, December 2007: Beds wired for electrical shock with electricity still on. Masks, whips, bloody knives, and chains hanging from ceiling on the site. Twenty-six bodies found buried on site: most had hands tied and were shot in the head. Locals said Al Qaeda was intimidating the area with threats of torture and execution.

Al Qaeda didn't come up with all of this on their own -- they had the help of a very gifted teacher named Saddam Hussein.

One professional interrogator I know has had a history of throwing hysterical fits over the American use of torture in the war on terror. When this sort of torture is pointed out to him, he demands to know if it is proposed that we should "keep up with the Joneses". For my part, I reply that articles like this are proof that we have a long way to go before we're even in the same neighborhood with the Joneses. But this doesn't fit his agenda, so he ignores it.

About those WMD

From today's Wall Street Journal:

...the most important news in the segment comes when Mr. Piro describes his conversations with Saddam about weapons of mass destruction. The FBI interrogator says that, while Saddam said he no longer had active WMD programs in 2003, the dictator admitted that he intended to resume those programs as soon as he possibly could.

Here's the relevant segment, which appears well down in the interview:

Mr. Piro: "The folks that he needed to reconstitute his program are still there."

Mr. Pelley: "And that was his intention?"

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Mr. Pelley: "What weapons of mass destruction did he intend to pursue again once he had the opportunity?"

Mr. Piro: "He wanted to pursue all of WMD. So he wanted to reconstitute his entire WMD program."

Mr. Pelley: "Chemical, biological, even nuclear."

Mr. Piro: "Yes."

Iraq's active WMD program had been destroyed, mostly by U.N. weapons inspectors, sometime in the 1990s, but Saddam told Mr. Piro that he maintained a pretense of having those weapons mainly to keep Iran at bay. This isn't exactly news. The key point is Saddam's admission that an Iraqi WMD program remained a threat so long as Saddam remained in power.

Opponents of the war argue that none of this matters because Saddam and his ambitions were being "contained" by U.N. sanctions. Hardly. As the Los Angeles Times reported in December 2000, "sanctions are crumbling among U.S. allies, who have begun challenging them with dozens of unauthorized flights into [Iraq]."

Bowing to this reality, the Bush Administration came to office the following month promising to ease the sanctions regime, even as it spent billions patrolling the so-called "No-Fly Zones." And as we learned after the invasion, Saddam was well on his way to breaking free of the sanctions by bribing everyone from a British member of parliament to a former French cabinet minister, all through a U.N. convenience known as Oil for Food.

In another telling moment in the "60 Minutes" interview, Mr. Piro relates that when he asked Saddam about his use of chemical weapons against Kurdish civilians, the dictator acknowledged that he had given the orders personally and explained himself in a word: "Necessary." The same still goes for getting rid of Saddam.

Iraq -- beyond the violence numbers

Those who opposed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein in 2003 prefer to focus on violence, for it has seemed to confirm their claim that the war was wrong. They've downplayed all good news from post-Saddam Iraq - the end of an evil regime that had oppressed the Iraqi people for 35 years; the return home of a million-plus Iraqi refugees in the first year after liberation; the fact that the Iraqis got together to write a new constitution and hold referendums and free elections - for the first time in their history - and moved to form coalition governments answerable to the parliament.

The drop in violence is certainly a good thing. But other Iraq news, both good and bad, needs to be taken into account.

On the good side:

* More than 70 percent of the cells created by al Qaeda in Iraq have been dismantled, with vast amounts of money and arms seized from terrorists and insurgents. The so-called Islamic State in Iraq, set up by al Qaeda in parts of four provinces, has collapsed.

* Iraqis who'd sought temporary refuge in neighboring countries are returning home in large numbers - 1,000 a day returning from Syria alone.

* Thanks to mediation by Abdul-Aziz al-Hakim, leader of the Shiite coalition, the three groups that had withdrawn from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's coalition government are expected to return to the fold.

* The British forces' handover of Basra to Iraqi authorities was completed without a hitch; Iraq's second largest city is rapidly returning to normal.

* Iraq's national currency, the dinar, is trading at its highest level since 1990 against the Iranian rial, the Kuwaiti dinar and the US dollar.

* Iraqi oil production is at its highest since 2002. Oil Minister Hussein Shahrestani recently notified OPEC that Iraq intends to produce its full quota next year.

* There's a rush of applications to set up small and medium businesses. In Baghdad alone, the figure for October was 400, compared to 80 last August.

* The fourth American university in the Arab world, and the first in Iraq, has started work in Suleymanieh, close to the Iranian border.

And on the bad:

* All programs for training the new Iraqi army and police are behind schedule. The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) hasn't met even a third of its quota. Only one Iraqi officer is training at Sandhurst, the famed British military academy. (Former Prime Minister Tony Blair had promised 22 places.)

* A new leadership elite has emerged locally, but isn't represented in central decision-making. In parts of the country, the officials in place are isolated, if not actually disliked, while unofficial leaders organize and manage some services that government should provide.

* The parties dominating the parliament have failed to set a date for local elections - without which full return to normal is unlikely. The former exiles who now dominate know they'd lose power in any elections to new groups led by homegrown figures.

* Prime Minister al-Maliki continues to prevaricate over draft legislation on oil exploration, production, export and revenue-sharing.

* Draft bills on limiting the effects of de-Baathification and facilitating the inclusion of thousands of former officers and NCOs in the new army remain backburnered. This gives the impression that the governing coalition, strengthened by the drop in violence, is reluctant to take measures that might loosen its hold on power.

As a result of pressure by the ruling elite, the crackdown on corruption and embezzlement, launched earlier this year, has ground to a halt. Public perception of widespread corruption - coupled with the government's inability to provide regular services - undermines the legitimacy of the authorities.

* The government has taken few steps to help those driven out of their homes to return to their original places of abode. Most returnees are persuaded to settle in other areas. The net effect is to "ratify" the ethnic cleansing imposed by militants in the heyday of the "war of the sectarians."

* With pressure from al Qaeda and the insurgency easing, the ruling elites (even the Kurds, who'd hitherto remained united) have become involved in bitter power feuds. The United States is doing little to persuade the elites to spend their energies on more productive endeavors.

* The command-economy mindset, discredited after liberation, is making a comeback. The new budget presented to the parliament is based on the principle of a rentier economy: The state, thanks to its control of oil revenues, affects all major decisions. The idea of a modern capitalist economy, much in vogue in 2003-'04, appears to have been shelved, at least for now.

* The authorities appear to be ignoring cultural fascists who are trying to impose their vision of an "Islamic society" through terror. This is especially the case in the predominantly Shiite provinces of the south, where the so-called campaign of "re-Islamicization" is openly funded by Iran. Friends of the new Iraq must impress on its leaders that these cultural fascists could, in time, prove as deadly as al Qaeda terrorists.

IRAQ today is a hundred times better than what it would have been under Saddam in any imaginable circumstances. Statistics of violence don't begin to measure the efforts of a whole nation to re-emerge from the darkest night in its history. And in that sense, the news from Iraq since April 2003 has always been more good than bad.

What is new is that now more Americans appear willing to acknowledge this - good news in itself. As long as the United States remains resolute in its support for the new Iraq, there will be more good news than bad from what is at present the main battlefield in the War on Terror.