Barack Hussein Obama, Saddam Hussein And Al-Qa'ida

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 07:26:00 -0800 (PST), "leo...@gmail.com" <...@gmail.com> wrote:

Barack Hussein Obama, Saddam Hussein, And Al-Qa'ida

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
Thursday, February 28, 2008

In blaming America first for al-Qa'ida in Iraq's presence,
Barack Obama shows the difference between being glib
and being articulate and just why John McCain should be
president of the United States.

It was as if Neville Chamberlain was blaming World War
II on Winston Churchill, or if someone had claimed Hitler
wouldn't have invaded France if the British hadn't put
their expeditionary force there first.

In an incredible long-distance exchange with McCain, the
presumptive GOP nominee for president, Sen. Obama
first states that he would send soldiers back to Iraq "if
al-Qa'ida is forming a base in Iraq."

When McCain responded that "al-Qa'ida in Iraq" has that
name because it is already there, Obama replied that
there was "no such thing as al-Qa'ida in Iraq until George
Bush and John McCain decided to invade Iraq."

Slick Willie, meet slicker Barack, who is blissfully
unaware that terrorists hate us for what we are, not what
we do.

There are many reasons why we liberated Iraq, and John
McCain whispering in George Bush's ear was not one of
them. We did not "invade" Iraq. We went in under
authority of U.N. Resolution 1441, which gave Saddam
Hussein a "final opportunity" to give a full accounting of
what happened to the WMD that the mass murderer used
against his neighbors and own people, or there would be
"serious consequences." Saddam didn't, and there were.

We're sure Obama would rather have used some
"aggressive personal diplomacy," as he so glibly puts it,
on Saddam. His policy would be to bomb an ally such as
Pakistan while talking to a soon-to-be nuclear adversary
such as Iran.

And as long as Obama's borrowing phraseology from
other politicians, we're surprised he hasn't paraphrased
the words of the late William Borah, whom he rivals in
naivete.

On hearing of the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, the
Idaho senator lamented: "Lord, if only I could have
talked with Hitler, all this might have been avoided."

Ah, if only Barack had been able to talk with Saddam . . .

Whether we're talking about Saddam's Iraq, al-Qa'ida, or
other states and terrorist groups, the fact is that they
were and are linked by a common enemy and goal --
they want the U.S. destroyed. They are allies as much as
Germany, Japan and Italy were allies in World War II.
They may not coordinate every jot and tittle of their
efforts, but the enemy of their enemy is their friend.

That there were links was confirmed by Lee Hamilton,
vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission, who said that the
commission did not disagree with the administration's
assertion that there were connections between al-Qa'ida
and Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

Added Thomas Kean, commission chairman: "There
were contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida, a number of
them, some of them a little shadowy. They were definitely
there."

Indeed there were. For example, Abdul Rahman Yasin,
a member of the al-Qa'ida cell that detonated the 1993
World Trade Center bomb, found safe haven in Iraq,
and documents recently found in Tikrit indicate that
Saddam provided Yasin with both a home and a salary.
Why?

Back in 1999, ABC News reported that Saddam had
offered bin Laden asylum, citing their "long relationship"
and a December 1998 meeting in Afghanistan between
Osama and Iraqi intelligence chief Faruq Hijazi. And so
on, and so on.

In 1998, the Clinton Justice Department alleged in an
indictment against bin Laden that "al-Qa'ida reached an understanding
with the government of Iraq that al-Qa'ida
would not work against that government and that on
particular projects, specifically including weapons
development, al-Qa'ida would work cooperatively with
the government of Iraq."

As the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes has reported,
reams of captured documents show that elite Iraqi
military units trained some 8,000 al-Qaida terrorists. They
belonged to groups such as Algeria's GSPC, Palestinian
Islamic Jihad, Ansar al Islam and the Sudanese
Liberation Army, at camps in Samarra, in Ramadi and at
Salman Pak, where a Boeing 707 fuselage was used for
terrorist training.

Perhaps Obama has an explanation for Iraqi intelligence
operative Ahmed Hikmat Shaker helping one of the 9/11
hijackers get to Malaysia and attending the Kuala Lumpur
meeting in January 2000 with two of the hijackers, a
meeting roundly acknowledged to be the initial 9/11
planning session.

The charge that our liberation of Iraq has caused
terrorists to flock to Iraq disproves Obama's own
argument that Iraq is not central to the war on terror.
Better they flock to Iraq to be killed by American and Iraqi
troops than flock to a Pittsburgh or Detroit to execute
plans to kill Americans here.

A President McCain will understand that.