If the US blindly goes ahead with the threatened attack on Iraq, will that bring bin Laden closer to his goal, or further from it?
My judgment, based on more than 25 years of studying Muslim issues, is that it will bring bin Laden much, much closer.
(snip)
The key piece of evidence on this in Powell's speech was a slide showing a grainy satellite image of a dozen small buildings grouped around a courtyard. "Terrorist poison and explosives factory, Khurmal," the caption read.
"This camp is located in northeastern Iraq," Powell said, alleging that the members of a shadowy terrorist group called the Zarqawi network were using the factory for "teaching its operatives how to produce ricin and other poisons."
Scary stuff, yes? The problem is, not much of it seems to be true. Khurmal is not under Hussein's control at all: It lies in the part of northern Iraq controlled by the Kurds and protected by the US-British air umbrella.
Further, villagers in Khurmal hotly deny that their village hosts any terrorists at all. On Feb. 5, they showed Western reporters around Khurmal and told them that the nearest encampment of Islamic extremists was in another village several miles away.
The politics of Iraqi Kurdistan are very complex. But the International Crisis Group (ICG),a research organization in Brussels whose analysts are very familiar with the region, has cast serious doubt on the US claims. Some of these analysts worked on documenting Hussein's use of chemical weapons against Kurdish villagers in the 1980s - and they're not "soft" on him at all.
An ICG report released last week - "Radical Islam In Iraqi Kurdistan: The Mouse That Roared?" assumed that when talking about the Zarqawi network, Powell was referring to "Ansar al-Islam," a Kurdish Islamic-extremist group that controls an enclave near - not in - Khurmal. It noted that there is little independent evidence of links between Ansar and Baghdad. Such evidence as has been presented came, it said, from the notably unreliable source of "confessions" obtained from captured Ansar militants, sometimes under duress. ICG judged that it would be very hard for people or military supplies to pass between Baghdad and the Ansar enclave because a secular Kurdish group hostile to both of them controls all the routes between them.
"The only thing that is indisputable," the report concludes, "is that the [Ansar] group could not survive without the support of powerful factions in neighbouring Iran, its sole lifeline to the outside world."
References to Clinton are completely irrelevant.
