Though Al Gore’s latest “major policy address” was delivered at
a slightly lower volume than his screaming rants from earlier in
the year, the pitch was no less fevered. Among other things, he
accused the Bush administration of working with “a network of
‘rapid response’ digital Brown Shirts who work to pressure
reporters and their editors for ‘undermining support for our
troops.’”
How odd that Gore, who endorsed Howard Dean, should object so
strongly to Internet political activism. Perhaps he’s simply
offended that his ideological opponents would dare to use this
technology that he took the initiative in creating.
And “Brown Shirts”? Perhaps when valuable parts of Iraq
(oilfields, the port of Umm Qasr) are annexed; when all the good
farmland in the Tigris-Euphrates valley is appropriated and
repopulated with unemployed Americans of good breeding stock who
are paid bonuses above market rates and rewarded for each baby they
birth; when Iraq’s treasuries are looted and large tracts of
property are granted to generals and politically connected members
of the Washington elite; when members of the Sunni minority are
moved to ghettos and later to death camps; when, in short, Bush
treats Iraq as Hitler treated Poland, then the Nazi metaphors will
become perfectly apt.
As of now, not so much.
(As much as I’d like to take full credit for that observation, I
must note that blogger Stephen Green made it over a year ago.)
Perhaps even stranger is Gore’s assertion that linking al Qaeda
and Saddam proves that the administration is either “too dishonest
or too gullible” to govern.
It is true that there have been strong assertions of a Saddam-al
Qaeda link. Here’s a typical example:
Al Qaeda reached an understanding with the government
of Iraq that al Qaeda would not work against that government and
that on particular projects, specifically including weapons
development, al Qaeda would work cooperatively with the Government
of Iraq.
A complication, from Gore’s point of view: This comes from the
1998 Justice Department indictment of Osama bin Laden. It was the
position of the administration in which Gore served. Stephen F.
Hayes (from whose new book, The Connection, much of the
following is derived) was told by an official familiar with the
Clinton Justice Department’s deliberations over the indictment that
this line was “not an afterthought,” and that it “couldn’t have
gotten into the indictment unless someone was willing to testify to
it under oath.”
It was 1998 when the Clinton administration, in retaliation for
the Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, struck an al Qaeda
training camp in Afghanistan and the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant
in the Sudan. Though it remains controversial to this day, the al
Shifa plant was thought, based on a soil sample, to have been
producing VX nerve gas; many Clinton administration officials
defend the strike to this day, and many Bush administration
officials agree with their predecessors.
The al Shifa plant was thought to be connected to the Iraqi
government’s chemical weapons programs, and the Sudanese government
was deeply connected to al Qaeda at the time. Though it’s not clear
whether either al Qaeda knew where the chemical weapon technology
was coming from, or that Iraq knew that the Sudanese would pass the
weaponry to al Qaeda, that would seem to be a secondary question to
the risk of chemical weapons changing hands this way. In all, six
senior Clinton administration national security officials are on
record defending the strike on al Shifa citing an Iraqi
connection.
Indeed, the Clinton administration’s experiences with Saddam’s
penchant for terrorism go all the way back to Clinton’s first term,
when it was confirmed that the Iraqi Intelligence Service had
attempted an assassination of former President George H.W. Bush.
Clinton ordered a missile strike on the IIS headquarters in June,
1993, in retaliation.
“The suffering inside Iraq can come to an end when Saddam
Hussein’s regime is replaced,” said a top Clinton administration
official at the time. “And I hope — and most of the world
community hopes — that this regime based on terrorism and
atrocities against his own people will be replaced. Over time, we
hope to achieve that result.”
The official? Al Gore.
