November 26, 2003

Stephen F. Hayes, author of the Weekly Standard article which first reported on the memo, comments on it in today’s LA TIMES.

Nor do the Democrats appear to have taken into account this piece of information from a U.S. interview with Farouk Hijazi, former deputy director of Iraqi intelligence: “He said that in a 1994 meeting with Bin Laden in the Sudan, Bin Laden had requested that Iraq assist Al Qaeda with the procurement of an unspecified number of Chinese-manufactured anti-ship limpet mines Bin Laden also requested the establishment of Al Qaeda training camps inside Iraq.”

According to other reporting in the Feith document, Bin Laden eventually got at least some of those training camps. What happened there? “An Iraqi intelligence officer said that as of mid-March, the IIS [Iraqi Intelligence Service] was providing weapons to Al Qaeda members located at a training camp in northern Iraq, including rocket-propelled grenade (RPG-18) launchers.”

Other information in the document points to a secret operational relationship between Bin Laden and the Iraqi leader that goes well beyond mere “contacts” or “links” or “connections.” According to one entry, a “sensitive source” reported that “Iraq’s contacts intensified after Al Qaeda’s successful attacks against the U.S. embassies in Africa in August 1998.”

The LA TIMES also prints a rebuttal, from Christopher Scheer. Scheer’s article makes no attempt to refute any point made by Hayes. He starts by saying that the leak of the memo was timed purposely to back up the Bush administration position. Duh. Most leaks are made to back up someone’s position. This doesn’t refute the points in the leaked memo.

Scheer concludes with this:

The simple fact is, Al Qaeda didn’t need Iraq to pull off 9/11 or any of its other savage attacks, and even if all the anonymous statements in Feith’s memo panned out, there still would be no evidence Iraq significantly aided the extremists. We are, whatever the neocons might want us to believe, waging the wrong war in the wrong way.

So his conclusion is that all the points in the memo might be true; Al Qaeda may have been helped by Iraq; but Al Qaeda didn’t “need” Iraq. Therefore, Scheer concludes, we were wrong to attack Iraq.

So according to Scheer, most people who help terrorists kill Americans should be left in peace unless Scheer says they were “needed”. A brilliant military strategy.

So what is Mr. Scheer’s plan? How would he prevent another 9-11? I’d like to hear his suggestions on that. But that subject doesn’t appear to interest him.

Egypt and Syria were Once Christian Nations.

I found this surprising. But given that Christianity came from the Middle East originally, perhaps it shouldn’t be so unexpected.

Thomas F. Madden, associate professor and chair of the Department of History at Saint Louis University, discusses the History of Islam and of the Crusades.

Islam has always added converts via military conquest.

For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggressionan attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianityand for that matter any other non-Muslim religionhas no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades.

One of the biggest questions we are currently addressing is, how ingrained is this bias towards war in the Islamic nations of today? Are there enough peaceful devotees of Islam for the voice of reason to prevail, ultimately, in their own nations?

Daniel Pipes has made a brilliant contribution to finding the answer to this, by suggesting questions that may be asked of Muslims to assess their standing on key issues of war and peace.