Obama Needs to Read More
Obama’s foreign policy naivete regarding al Qaida and Iraq is a very worrying condition, if it’s true.
He claimed that al Qaida wouldn’t have been in Iraq if the US hadn’t “invaded” that country.
If that were true, it still would require a US presence going forward, even under Obama’s self-contradictory plans for Iraq. He would ’send troops back’ if al Qaida establishes a base.
But the claim that al Qaida wasn’t in Iraq before the US military presence is not only not true, but easily refuted just from the US open press: (from the IBD editorial today)
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-Qaida reached an understanding with the government of Iraq that al-Qaida would not work against that government and that on particular projects, specifically including weapons development, al-Qaida 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.
Now, either Obama is willfully naive - ignoring any information about Iraq, or he is demagoging.
Maybe it’s like his NAFTA position - for public voter consumption, but not what he will actually do once he gets in office.
Either way, he’s dangerous for foreign policy.
