Posted on 01/17/2005 2:50:49 PM PST by swilhelm73
Just to pile on his point a bit, it is important to note that Cliff is talking about the safe haven that the NIC report says Iraq has become post-Saddam. What it doesn't address, and what the MSM -- with heroic exceptions like our friend Steve Hayes -- remain in denial over is the terrorist haven Iraq was during Saddam's reign.
Acknowledge it or not: terrorist training went on there; terrorists like Zarqawi and Zawahiri were welcome there; Bin Laden himself was offered safe haven there, and one of the 1993 WTC bombers was actually harbored there, on Saddam's payroll, for a decade after eluding prosecution by fleeing to Iraq; and Saddam's intelligence service attempted to murder former President George H.W. Bush, importuned jihadists to bomb Radio Free Europe in Prague, and at least one met with some of the 9/11 hijackers during the preparation phase. There's more, but you get the point.
This is not a legacy the intelligence community seemed particularly occupied by prior to the war, preferring to obsess over weapons of mass destruction and, for reasons that continue to baffle, underselling Saddam's terrorism as a jusitification for including him in a war on, well, terror. But it is the legacy nonetheless. And it is important to note that: To the extent terrorists have found a safe haven in the current Iraq, it is because they laid a solid foundation in Saddam's Iraq for years before March 2003.
Terrorist havens? Try Portland and Seattle.
Try throughout the USA, thanks to our "Open Borders" policy. It's only a matter of time before we pay the price for this policy.
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