Redstate

By Dan McLaughlin Posted in War — Comments (8) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

When the history of the decision to go to war in Iraq is written, there's one fact that I have to believe will get more attention than it does today: the fact that Saddam Hussein hired terrorists to murder George H.W. Bush.

On one level, it's not hard to see why this hasn't been a larger part of the story. War supporters, focusing on the case for war in our broad national interests, have been loathe to focus on a casus belli of uniquely personal interest to the president. War opponents have two motives: those who ascribe the war to ideological or pro-Israel neocon perfidy or to "blood for oil" can't bear to admit that the wrongdoing of Saddam Hussein played a greater role, and besides, admitting that a terrorist attack by Saddam's regime was one of the causes of the war requires opponents of the war to admit the very thing they have consistently contended was unthinkable: Iraqi planning and initiation of a cross-border terrorist attack.

The Bush Administration has likewise mostly shied away from this storyline, with the notable exception being a September 2002 GOP fundraiser where Bush referred to Saddam as "the guy who tried to kill my dad." Even personality-driven commentators like Maureen Dowd have tended to focus on the connection of the war to Bush's father as being more about unfinished business from the first Gulf War than about revenge for attempted murder. As to the Arab world - well, many parts of Arab society remain traditionally clannish and patriarchal, and in such a society, it's hard to think of a better reason to go to war than an attempt on the life of the patriarch of the family. Thus, to denounce the war on terms agreeable to many Arabs, it's necessary to gloss over this fact.

The basic facts are essentially undisputed, and laid out in detail in Stephen Hayes' masterful book The Connection: in 1993, Saddam's regime sent two assassins, Iraqi nationals, into Kuwait with explosives and orders to set off bombs with the hope of killing Bush (and, presumably, lots of bystanders in the process). One of the men even carried a suicide bomber's belt. President Clinton said at the time - in a nationally televised speech - that there was "compelling evidence" of the plot, that it "was directed and pursued by the Iraqi Intelligence Service," and his Secretary of Defense stated that "[t]he evidence is very conclusive" that the plot "would have had to have been approved by the highest levels of the Iraqi government." Of course, while the men were presumably picked to provide deniability to the Iraqi government - one was a Shiite who had been involved in an anti-Saddam uprising - their subsequent capture and exposure carried the obvious lesson that using domestic Iraqi nationals still made such operations too easy to trace.

Now, the decision to go to war is, and should be, a decision made in the nation's interest, and not for the satisfaction of the president's personal grudges. And, like most supporters of the war, I'm content to justify it on those grounds, and think it unlikely that the many grounds for war were somehow a pretext. (Although some might say that Bush has unique moral authority on the subject of the dangers of the Iraqi dictator as a result of the targeting of his family). But realistically, you would expect the attempt to blow up the president's father to affect the decisionmaking process. Put yourself in Bush's shoes: if you were asked to decide whether Saddam Hussein would ever get involved with terrorism, wouldn't it affect the way you looked at the evidence that Saddam had already attempted a terrorist attack designed to kill a member of your family? And isn't that, in fact, an entirely logical and natural way to approach such a question?