The left’s denial of the Iraq-Al Qaeda link is the Big Lie that
has hardened into dogma. To cement the lie, liberals will even
trust the testimony of terrorists over the words of the president
of the United States. They don’t believe George Bush’s evidence for
the link but they do believe Al Qaeda’s denial of it. The 9/11
Commission, for example, takes this denial from professional liars
and killers at face value in its attempt to disprove the link. “Two
senior bin Laden associates have adamantly denied that any ties
existed between Al Qaeda and Iraq,” the Commissioners write. Notice
the phrase adamantly denied, as if the intensity of the
terrorists’ denial lends credence to it. Do judges treat the
testimony of terrorists as unimpeachable evidence when its
“adamant”?
Alger Hiss adamantly denied his links to the Soviet Union. He
was lying. And the left dogmatized his deception for decades. Even
in its obit for Hiss, the New York Times was hedging its
bets, treating his lie like an unsolved mystery: “To still others,
many of them on the left, Mr. Hiss was what William Reuben, a
friend and the author of one of the dozens of books on the case,
called an ‘American saint.’”
Back then — as now with Saddam Hussein (the Commission
acknowledges his “contacts” with Al Qaeda but denies a
“collaborative relationship” between them) — the left might
occasionally concede contacts but would always dispute that
contacts meant collaboration. Just because Alger Hiss met with
Communists doesn’t mean he “collaborated” with the Soviet Union.
Just because Saddam Hussein harbored Nick Berg’s beheader, Abu
Musab Zarqawi, before the war doesn’t mean he collaborated with
anti-American terrorists. Zarqawi, I should make clear, had
contacts with Al Qaeda but didn’t collaborate with them. According
to nuanced observers, he was an “autonomous” terrorist. Sort of
like Saddam Hussein.
Yes, Saddam Hussein’s regime cooperated with Al Qaeda in arms
development and weapons training, let it set up terrorism camps in
Iraq, counted Bin Laden as an “asset,” but don’t mistake any of
this for a “collaborative relationship.” If domestic criminals,
accused of serving as accomplices to crime, could set the
evidentiary bar this high for a “collaborative relationship,” they
would be free on the streets.
Perhaps Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein before the war should have
hired a Madison Avenue public relations firm to launch a campaign
against Bush for his McCarthyite smear against them. Remember when
Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega tried that tack? Ortega hired a
New York public relations firm to persuade the American people and
their leaders that his contacts with the Soviet Union didn’t amount
to collaborating with the evil empire in threatening the United
States.
The campaign worked fairly well for a few years. Ortega’s
sympathizers in Congress accused Ronald Reagan of “red-baiting” and
“McCarthyism.” They savaged him for hyping the relationship between
the Sandinistas and the Soviets. Sure, Ortega had at least 3,500
Cuban advisers train his army, had East German goons in his
security force, had helicopters and ships courtesy of Moscow. But
that didn’t rise to the level of a dangerous collaborative
relationship, the left lectured Reagan.
Journalist Evan Thomas wrote that Reagan had “exaggerated” the
threat of Ortega. “To him, Nicaragua’s Ortega, in his Castro-style
fatigues, is not merely a Third World revolutionary who delights in
tweaking Uncle Sam, but an agent of the Kremlin, bent on spreading
Communism through the hemisphere.” Thomas scoffed at Reagan’s
intensity on his “idée fixe” — “stopping Communism.” John
Kerry assured his colleagues that Ortega wasn’t forming a Soviet
beachhead in Nicaragua, then a few days later Ortega surfaced in
Moscow to pick up a large check. That didn’t matter. Reagan still
had no right to hold up a button saying “If You Like Cuba, You Will
Love Nicaragua” and call Nicaragua a “cancer” and “second Libya,
right on the doorstep of the United States.”(Ortega, by the way,
also had contact with Middle Eastern terrorists — Managua during
his reign boasted an Arab-Libyan cultural center. But whether his
posters of Muammar Qaddafi signaled a willingness to collaborate
with them remains an open question.)
The left described Ortega as a desperate mendicant, driven into
the arms of the Soviet Union after Reaganites ganged up on him.
“Without U.S. aid, to whom can Nicaragua turn for help but
the Soviet Union after inheriting an economy bankrupted by the late
Anastasio Somoza and his followers?” said one liberal at the time.
Before too long, the left in the same way will dismiss Saddam
Hussein’s mere “contacts” with Al Qaeda as the product of American
provocation.
