The War for History
On the fifth anniversary of our entry into the Battle of Iraq, the piece we find ourselves thinking of is Adam Kirsch's review, last Wednesday in the Sun, of Nicholson Baker's revisionist history — "perverse tract," Mr. Kirsch called it — on the origins of World War II. The New York Times gave the book, "Human Smoke," a pre-publication lift with a piece about how Mr. Baker was attempting "to slow down time and look at things carefully." It turns out, Mr. Kirsch reported, that Mr. Baker's book is an attempt at "countering the received myth of the good war" with Mr. Baker's "own myth of the bad war." Even the Times, when it had William Grimes read the tome, concluded Mr. Baker's was a "self-important, hand-wringing, moral mess of a book."
It is a reminder that the struggle for a clear view of war and history is a never-ending quest, a point President Bush clearly comprehends. While the Democrats have endlessly alleged that the war was premised on a lie, Mr. Bush marked the anniversary yesterday by underscoring the profundity of the evil our GIs encountered. They, Mr. Bush said, "uncovered children's prisons, and torture chambers, and rape rooms where Iraqi women were violated in front of their families. They found videos showing regime thugs mutilating Iraqis deemed disloyal to Saddam. And across the Iraqi countryside they uncovered mass graves of thousands executed by the regime."
The president's remarks followed the release by the Pentagon last week of its new report analyzing 600,000 captured documents from Iraq to see what light they might shed on Saddam Hussein's links to international terrorism. Few bothered to report the conclusion of the report, content instead with one line in the executive summary: "This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda." But it concluded, "Evidence that was uncovered and analyzed attests to the existence of a terrorist capability and a willingness to use it until the day Saddam was forced to flee Baghdad by Coalition forces."
The hardliners were right, after all. Saddam Hussein was a terror master, and he worked with international Jihad, including Al Qaeda affiliates, throughout the 1990s. The question of direct operational ties to Al Qaeda is a red herring that obscures the more significant point. Our Eli Lake reported on Friday on an Iraqi Intelligence Service memo to Saddam from March 18, 1993, on the terrorist organizations it was then assisting. The memo says, "In a meeting in Sudan, we agreed to renew our relations with the Islamic Jihad Organization in Egypt." That group, better known as Egyptian Islamic Jihad, was founded in 1979 by Ayman al Zawahiri, the man who is currently Osama bin Laden's deputy.
It turns out that Saddam ordered that financial support be given to this group that formally merged in 1998 with Al Qaeda. The trove the Pentagon analyzed also contains an order, drafted in 1993, in which Saddam Hussein instructs the sending of fighters to Somalia. That same year Osama bin Laden had sent his own fighters to that country to kill Americans. The Pentagon study goes on to say, "Captured Iraqi archives reveal that Saddam was training Arab fighters (non-Iraqi) in Iraqi training camps more than a decade prior to OPERATION DESERT STORM (1991)." The analysis of the Iraqi documents does not find that Saddam Hussein controlled Al Qaeda, but that he was willing to align with Islamic terrorists.
To put it another way, the relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq was not that of two disconnected entities, but rather of two enemies of America quite willing to collaborate when it was in the interest of the two organizations. This thesis was illuminated, on the eve of our invasion of Iraq, by Jeffrey Goldberg, then of the New Yorker, who found that Saddam's security service had worked with Al Qaeda to support Ansar al Islam. The Pentagon report, issued more than five years later, uncovers memos from Saddam's IIS from December 1998 deciding to begin offering a radical Kurdish Islamist movement "financial and moral support."
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That Nicholson Baker can trundle in more than 60 years after World War II with a book suggesting Churchill and FDR were as bad as Hitler is a reminder that it's none too soon to begin the hard work of establishing, illuminating, and protecting the record in respect of the current struggle with Islamist terror. It will assuredly be a long struggle, involving newspapermen, spies, politicians, and scholars many years hence. The Pentagon report will prove a reference, but more work will be needed. And to the young writers who are now in school and will be engaged in this work in the years to come, we can only say, be of good stamina.
