It takes weeks to get an appointment with this guy. I hadn’t seen him since late last year. And now here he was. Amid the bustle of bourgeois matrons buying eclairs and macaroons, we chatted in low tones about the threat of war and terror.
I was especially interested, as most of us are, in the question of when the war with Iraq is likely to begin. He’d need to know to prepare for counter-terror responses, I thought. And he said, with absolute assurance, “March 3 or 4.” As I write, it’s March 6. So much for that bit of information from this informed source. Was my baguette-buying friend just plain wrong? Or had he been misinformed? Was the date for war, if date there was, put off by diplomacy? By the United Nations deadlock? The Turkish parliament? Or was it because of logistical snafus in the military?
If you expect definitive answers to any of these questions, read no further. Because the truth is that we’re already deep in the fog of war. If the continued uncertainty is part of some psychological operation to shake up the inner circle of hardened killers around Saddam Hussein, well, they’re still looking pretty steady. These thugs have been in a war of nerves all their lives. Many have survived assassination attempts. Many have murdered rivals of the regime with their own hands. We can expect Saddam and his cronies to hang tough until, well, until they hang. But in the meantime, a proliferation of dubious “facts” and willful blind spots about the approaching conflict has a corrosive effect on international trust just when that’s needed most.
The problem is not limited to the United States. Sources close to the French intelligence services, for instance, say they have no doubt whatsoever that Saddam Hussein pursued an aggressive program to acquire weapons of mass destruction in the four years after United Nations inspectors withdrew in 1998. They’re sure he’s got hidden weapons now. But you wouldn’t know that from the way French diplomacy tried to weaken the impact of sanctions in years past, and continues undermining the hard line the U.N. took last fall with the passage of Security Council Resolution 1441.
The Americans, however, get credit for the most egregious smokescreens. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Power Point presentation before the Security Council a month ago is an especially sore point with European and Arab intelligence services. The intent was to tie Saddam Hussein to current terrorist activities, and thus bolster the case for war. But much of what Powell presented was deemed an exaggeration by friendly European and Arab intelligence analysts (and privately by some U.S. officials). “It was garbage,” said one. “The thinnest thing I’ve ever seen,” said another.
Yes, a sometime Al Qaeda operative named Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi got medical treatment in Baghdad last spring, but under an assumed name, according to several sources. And yes, he allegedly dispatched and funded the assassins of USAID official Laurence Foley in Amman in October. But Zarqawi’s network operated from Iran and northern Iraq (out of Saddam’s control), and his agents traveled to Jordan through Syria.
“Fortunately,” said Mr. Baguette, “the technical cooperation with the CIA–even the cooperation with France–is still excellent.” But there are stories that U.S. officials who deal with day-to-day coordination of counter-terror activities apologized to their European counterparts for the way Powell’s presentation clouded the intelligence needed for an effective war on terrorism: that is, against Osama bin Laden and his acolytes.
Indeed, in the counter-terror community there’s widespread recognition that the public push for war in Iraq is directly at odds with the secret war against terrorism, and the successes of late have come not because of Washington’s saber rattling, but in spite of it. In Pakistan, tensions are rising because of pressure from Washington on Islamabad to vote for its new attack-Iraq resolution in the U.N. Security Council. And the best friends the United States has in the fight against the Qaeda cliques holed up in northern Iraq (Zarqawi’s stomping grounds) have been the Kurds. But to win Ankara’s support for a northern front against Saddam, Washington has green-lighted a Turkish occupation of Iraqi Kurdish territory.
Certainly the arrest of key Al Qaeda planner Khalid Shaikh Mohammed last week in Pakistan was a master stroke. And if the CIA’s luck and international cooperation hold up, Osama himself may be in custody. (“What doesn’t happen in a year, happens in a day.”)
Yet counter-terror officials are more worried than ever about a new wave of terror. Once the fighting in Iraq begins, warns an Arab intelligence analyst with close ties to the CIA, “everybody will see everything on the spot and as it happens.” TV images of civilians killed in Iraq, inevitably, will run side by side with those of Israel’s tanks rolling through Palestinian refugee camps. “There will be a sense of hate, of a grudge, throughout the region,” says the analyst. Moreover, there’s very little confidence the United States can or will hold Iraq together once Saddam is gone. From chaos will spring inchoate terror. “There will be hundreds of organizations–the Islamic Front for This, Mohammed’s Army of That,” says the same official. “They will be one of Iraq’s main exports.”
So when will that war against Iraq actually begin? In the minds of many people in the trenches of the war on terror, never would be too soon.
