LINKS, OR LINKS?

The BBC reports:

US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has cast doubt on whether there was ever a relationship between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda.

The alleged link was one of the justifications used by President Bush for the invasion of Iraq.

Mr Rumsfeld was asked by a New York audience about connections between Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden.

"To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two," he said.

Donald Rumsfeld's off-the-cuff comments are often very revealing, says the BBC's Justin Webb in Washington. . .

As a quote I placed in my right hand bar reminds us, "If men are going to go together, they will ride on almost any words, but if they are going to break apart, the words seem to be of very great significance." One current example: the word "links".

1) There are "links" between the governments at London and at Washington. They are formal and regular, acknowledged by both, and above board, clear for all to see.

2) As most of us know, there may also be said to be "links" that are "less regular" and "less above board" -- as in those between Saddamite Iraq and the amorphous entities that were Islamist terrorist organizations, owing to their having had a common enemy, and there having been some flowing of money and personnel between Hussein's Iraq (a totalitarian state, where no one entered without the approval of the "Supreme Leader" -- example, Zarqawi) and Islamist terrorist organizations, as irregular entities (example, Iraq's giving money to suicide bombers' families).

What is al Qaeda? Is it a well-integrated tactical, as well as strategic, command and control machine, equivalent to, say, a U.S. army corps? Or is it a grouping that more ebbs and flows and changes shape, more an "umbrella" and common cause, than a top-down, clearly-defined hierarchical organization? Our base of knowledge currently would seem to indicate that it is far more of the latter, than the former. (And we know, for example, that many Islamists not previously close to bin Laden -- he ain't the only Islamist, of course -- personally have since September 11, 2001 nailed themselves to the "master's" masthead, at least informally, using his "success" in New York and Washington as a rallying point. The Jordanian Zarqawi in Iraq may be the best known example of that.)

However, the gradations of such are apparently just too much for many to internalize. ("Don't bother me. I'm busy in the midst of this woodland, looking for the trees".) And that the enemy might actually want to hide things from us seems to have no place within the calculations of those with "definition difficulty".

Is there a concerted media attempt to create an impression the Bush administration had believed firmly that Saddamite Iraq/Islamist terror groups were a relationship along the lines of 1) above, when what the administration actually tended to believe and meant by "links" was that it was a relationship far more akin to 2)? Rumsfeld backs the 2), further down the BBC page:

. . . Mr Rumsfeld added that Saddam Hussein's regime was not the "Little Sisters of the Poor" - Iraq had been on the US State Department's terrorist list and made payments for Palestinian suicide bombings, he said.

"The relationships between these folks are complicated. They evolve and change over time. In many cases, these different networks have common funders."

He also said that although most of al-Qaeda's senior leaders had sworn an oath to Osama Bin Laden, the man suspected to be the principal leader of the network in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had not.

Mr Zarqawi's reported presence in Baghdad before the war has been cited in the past by the US administration as evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. . .

So, in short, it ain't complicated -- unless one wants it to be. Stealth and murk were and are the orders of the day for this enemy. Yet the public's head has been left spinning by a media that is either just plain incapable of understanding the word "links", or, much worse, is determined to imply that the administration, all along, had "really meant" 1).

Former CPA administrator L. Paul Bremer is also quoted by the BBC, offering a different set of "failings":

. . . The former US governor of Iraq, Paul Bremer, said on Monday the US had made two mistakes in the conflict in Iraq - although he was still in favour of intervening in Iraq.

Leaving aside the mistakes for a moment. I just like that the BBC piece actually terms him "former US governor of Iraq". Is that former governor as in, like, former "Roman governor of Judea", sort of governor?

One error was not having enough ground troops to take control of the country.

I don't know what to make of this. If that is accurate, it is curious Bremer would choose to say such. After all, it was he who insisted that the remnants of the defeated Iraqi army be disbanded -- an army that, properly led, might have provided a ready source of security. So while getting rid of the officers made sense, that policy also turned loose thousands of enlisted men to try to find a source of income in a nearly non-existent job market. So, it is logical to believe that at least some of those former soldiers must now make up part of the "insurgency".

The US also made the mistake of not containing the violence and looting quickly enough after Saddam Hussein was ousted, he said.

. . . Which one can hardly criticize. For, given the disbanding of the army, it was bound to occur.

UPDATE: I thought it sounded funny. CNN explained it better:

L. Paul Bremer, speaking Monday at the opening session of the 91st annual Insurance Leadership Forum in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia, said "horrid" looting was occurring when he arrived in Baghdad on May 6, 2003. . .

He was being specific, in his belief that they should have used more troops in the assault. And that's a fair argument. He is also of the belief that more troops would have prevented "looting". Again, fair enough.

But would it not have been better to have at least partly used the remnants of the Iraqi army, to have done such things, over the next few months?  ¶ by Robert, Tuesday, October 05, 2004