While parrying partisan attacks on its decision to eject Saddam
Hussein from power, the Bush administration last Friday received
surprise support from one of the Iraq war’s staunchest foes:
Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Speaking at a summit in Kazakhstan, Putin served up a shocker.
According to Russian intelligence, he said, the Ba’athist regime
had been developing plans to strike at the United States, as well
as American interests overseas. Putin claimed he took these plans
so seriously that he had warned the United States several times
after 9-11 about the looming danger posed by Iraq.
Iraq a threat to American national security? You heard heard it from Putin: “I can confirm that after
the events of September 11, 2001, and up to the military operation
in Iraq, Russian special services and Russian intelligence several
times received … information that official organs of Saddam’s
regime were preparing terrorist acts on the territory of the United
States and beyond its borders, at U.S. military and civilian
locations,” Putin said.
Further buttressing that claim was the anonymous Russian
intelligence agent, who confirmed to the Russian Interfax news agency
that Russia had received a report early in 2002, detailing the
plans of Iraqi secret agents to launch attacks on U.S. diplomatic
and military facilities. He also had some words of wisdom, noting
that “in investigating the causes of the Iraq crisis, it is
necessary to take into account all of the aspects, including the
direct threat to the United States from the Saddam Hussein
regime.”
With that, the Russians did more than just expose the hollowness
of their obstructionist opposition to the war; they also undercut
the argument of those critics — John Kerry springs fleetly to mind
— who claimed that Iraq was a war of choice, a feel-good
distraction from more pressing issues of national security.
Putin obviously takes a different view. In his telling, the
principal reason Russia objected to the war was that Saddam had yet
to attack the United States. That this was indeed Saddam’s
intention is, to Putin, beyond dispute. As he explained Friday, “It’s one thing to have
information that Saddam’s regime is preparing terrorist attacks,
but we didn’t have information that it was involved in any known
terrorist attacks.”
By this logic, if the Bush administration is to be condemned, it
is for not sitting back and waiting for the Iraqi attacks to go
through the tragic formality of taking place. Bush: Too Quick to
Fight Terrorism. You could do worse for an election-year
slogan.
OF COURSE, NOT ALL critics see it that way. Skeptics were swift to
note that the credibility of the Russian intelligence cited by
Putin is impossible to measure. They have a point. But it may be
remembered that Russian intelligence services have had a close
collaborative relationship with their Iraqi counterparts stretching
back three decades, ever since the erstwhile KGB inked a secret
intelligence agreement with Saddam Hussein’s spooks in 1973.
Nor has the relationship fizzled recently. Back in February, for
example, news reports cast light on the continuing cooperation
between Iraq and Russian intelligence services, exposing an
intelligence swap that included a Russian-supplied list of
assassins available for “hits” in the West; details of arms deals
in the Middle East; and a signed agreement to share intelligence.
As a former KGB head with close ties to Russia’s top intelligence
agency, the Federal Security Service (FSB), Putin was clearly privy
to this intelligence.
This forces the question: Why wasn’t the Russian intelligence
included in the administration’s case for war? The shocked reaction
its revelation elicited from the U.S. intelligence community on
Friday suggests an answer: Contrary to the Russians’ claims, they
never supplied it. And why would they? Armed with a host of
compelling justifications for regime change, the U.S. didn’t
exactly need another reason to oust Saddam. The Russians weren’t
about to give them one, in any case. Now, eager to mend fences,
they’ve relented.
But possibly the biggest reason to doubt claims that Russia
actually turned over the intelligence to the United State is its
source, the FSB. The agency put up fierce objections to war in
Iraq. So fierce, in fact, that one eminent Russian media defense
analyst described the agency in 2003 as “a leading party of the
pro-Saddam lobby.”
Whatever one makes of the dubious Russian claims about
intelligence sharing, the revelation that Saddam had every design
to attack the United States underscores the wisdom of the
preemptive war against Iraq. Add to this the September 11
commission’s findings that there were verifiable contacts between
Iraq and al Qaeda, as well as the cropping up of sarin and other
chemical weapons in Iraq, and it becomes clear that the
administration’s policy was correct all along.
Not that Bush came on with such certainty. In laying out his
casus belli, the president took great pains to stress that
Iraq was not an imminent threat. Maybe he should not have hedged.
Better yet, he should have had Vladimir Putin make the case for
him.
