Donald Trump is Wrong (Again): Saddam Hussein Supported Terrorism
Donald Trump is Wrong (Again): Saddam Hussein Supported Terrorism
July 6, 2016
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 6, 2016
(source)
Last night Donald Trump unburdened himself of the view that Saddam Hussein was an efficient anti-terrorist operator. It is a statement Trump has made before, and it is one of such staggering ignorance—yet one which has such wide sympathy—that it seemed worth examining the multiple ways in which it was wrong.
Trump and Saddam
Trump’s praise for Saddam having “made a living off killing terrorists” in February followed a statement in December 2015,
“Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy, ‘oh he’s using gas!'” Trump said. Describing the way stability was maintained in the region during that time, Trump said “they go back, forth, it’s the same. And they were stabilized.”
One might wonder if the use of chemical weapons of mass destruction against the Iranians during the eight-year war Saddam started can really be called “stability,” and the genocidal use of such weapons as part of the Anfal campaign that murdered at least 100,000 Kurds hardly seems to have helped regional stability either.
Trump’s exact statement from last night was:
Saddam Hussein was a bad guy … really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. It was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism. You want to be a terrorist, you go to Iraq.
Christopher Hitchens used to say that anyone who would content themselves with saying only that Saddam Hussein was “a bad guy” did not know anything about that man, his regime, or Iraq, and that rule can be safely said to hold in this case. It does accidentally contain a truth, however: If you “want to be a terrorist, you go to Iraq,” was in fact a well-known maxim for international terrorists for many decades.
A Long Trail of Murder
Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal) had many paymasters and agendas in his career as the most infamous international terrorist before Usama bin Ladin, but in preparation for that career and then for long stretches of it he was sheltered by Saddam. Hitchens met al-Banna in 1976 in Iraq, where he threatened Said Hammami, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative to Britain and a moderate who had publicly promoted a two-state solution long before it was acceptable in Palestinian politics. Hammami was struck down in London on 4 January 1978 by a member of the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). This was just one of many crimes Saddam enabled al-Banna to commit.
Al-Banna departed Iraq to Assad’s Syria in 1979, but returned to Saddam’s realm in March 1982, after he had acquired the moniker of “the Arab world’s foremost terrorist.” It was from Baghdad that al-Banna attempted to murder Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to London, sparking Israel’s invasion of Lebanon to dismantle the PLO’s state-within-a-state. Al-Banna had been assisted by his cousin, Marwan al-Banna, and an Iraqi intelligence officer, Nawaf al-Rosan. The assassination was, by al-Banna’s own effective admission (p. 240), directed from Baghdad, and was intended to—and succeeding in—damaging to the strategic standing and military capacity of Saddam’s great rival in Damascus that had heretofore had almost unchallenged primacy over Lebanon. The other intended outcome—to divert Clerical Iran to “resistance” against Israel, rather than being willing to continue fighting the Iran-Iraq War—failed.
A wave of assassinations and attempted assassinations then followed from the ANO against Jordanian, Kuwaiti, and Emirati officials. There is every reason to believe that the attacks against Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates especially were, at the least, encouraged by Saddam since those two states were making overtures to normalize their relations with the Iranian revolution that Saddam was then at war with.
Al-Banna departed Iraq again in November 1983—though parts of his organization remained there—and again put himself at the service of Hafez al-Assad. Though the Assad regime is now presenting itself as a victim and opponent of terrorism, before geopolitical amnesia set in the regime was known for carrying the near-unique attribute of having sponsored terrorism against every single one of its neighbours. Assad’s bugbear in the mid-1980s was Jordan—which was showing dangerous signs of making peace with Israel—so al-Banna was directed to blow up her diplomatic outposts and murder her diplomats, which he duly did from India to Spain.
Al-Banna would, in 1987, take up residence in Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya—another bizarrely lamented government (including by Trump) whose record as a global, long-standing state-sponsor of terrorism has been clumsily revised—where al-Banna ended up massacring most of ANO’s members after being deceived into thinking his organization was riddled with spies. Al-Banna was reported to be in Egypt in the summer of 1998, and finally came back to Iraq in December 1998. The curtain finally came down for al-Banna in August 2002: a suicide, reported Saddam’s regime, wherein he had shot himself three times in the head.
Wadi Haddad, the deputy leader of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its head of foreign operations, is the man “chiefly responsible for exporting Palestinian terrorism to Europe” (p. 246). The first PFLP action was the July 1968 hijacking of an El Al 707 that was forced to land in Algiers, and freed sixteen Palestinians after a month-long negotiation with Israel. Haddad was shortly after this recruited as a fully-fledged agent by the KGB. In March 1972, Habash formally renounced international terrorism, a position bitterly contested by a Haddad-led wing of the PFLP, which broke away and formed the Special Operations Group. It was in Saddam’s Baghdad that Haddad’s pro-terrorism faction found haven (p. 250).
Haddad directed the two most spectacular terrorist operations of the 1970s out of Baghdad: the 21 December 1975 takeover of the meeting of the OPEC oil ministers in Vienna and the 27 June 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane that ended a week later with the Entebbe raid on 4 July. On the ground, the OPEC attack was led by a man nearly as notorious as al-Banna, the Venezuelan terrorist and mercenary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, much better known as “Carlos the Jackal,” who was a close associate of Haddad’s. Long believed to be a Qaddafi-supported attack, Sanchez biographer David Yallop is among those who names Saddam as the “real culprit” (p. 424).
Haddad and Sanchez fell out after the operation. Haddad had ordered that the oil ministers be released one-by-one after making an obeisance to the Palestinian cause, except for the Iranian and Saudi ministers who were to be killed. Sanchez instead ransomed the two captives for a large sum, and Haddad dismissed Sanchez from his “operational teams” (p. 254). Haddad died in March 1978 after being poisoned months earlier by MOSSAD via Belgian chocolates and was buried in Iraq. Haddad’s men retained (p. 142) residence in, and assistance from, Saddam’s regime into the 1990s.
Sanchez has denied that Saddam was involved in the Vienna operation, but this was not his only link to the Iraqi Ba’ath regime. In September 1976, after Sanchez was deported from Jugoslavija, it was to Baghdad he was transferred (p. 107-109), where he was “put up free of charge, … provided with bodyguards, and chauffeured American limousine,” until he decided to move on several weeks later. In December 1977, Sanchez travelled (p. 111) again to Baghdad, this time in the company of Libyan intelligence officers, meeting Saddam personally and forging a relationship that made Saddam one of the first Arab rulers to support Sanchez, “with the blessing of the KGB-trained members of Iraq’s most powerful secret service,” the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) or Mukhabarat.
Sanchez resurfaced in the Iraqi context in the run-up to Operation DESERT STORM. In 1990-91, as Saddam sought to retain his conquest in Kuwait, he tasked various actors to conduct terrorist attacks (p. 37-42) against U.S. targets worldwide; Sanchez was believed at the time to be one such cutout. Sanchez was arrested in Sudan in 1994 and transferred to French prison, where he made his admiration for Bin Ladin known and came to the conclusion a number of far-Leftists have: the working class has let down the revolutionaries and the wave of the future is jihadism.
Donald Trump is Wrong (Again): Saddam Hussein Supported Terrorism
July 6, 2016
By Kyle Orton (@KyleWOrton) on July 6, 2016
(source)
Last night Donald Trump unburdened himself of the view that Saddam Hussein was an efficient anti-terrorist operator. It is a statement Trump has made before, and it is one of such staggering ignorance—yet one which has such wide sympathy—that it seemed worth examining the multiple ways in which it was wrong.
Trump and Saddam
Trump’s praise for Saddam having “made a living off killing terrorists” in February followed a statement in December 2015,
“Saddam Hussein throws a little gas, everyone goes crazy, ‘oh he’s using gas!'” Trump said. Describing the way stability was maintained in the region during that time, Trump said “they go back, forth, it’s the same. And they were stabilized.”
One might wonder if the use of chemical weapons of mass destruction against the Iranians during the eight-year war Saddam started can really be called “stability,” and the genocidal use of such weapons as part of the Anfal campaign that murdered at least 100,000 Kurds hardly seems to have helped regional stability either.
Trump’s exact statement from last night was:
Saddam Hussein was a bad guy … really bad guy. But you know what he did well? He killed terrorists. He did that so good. They didn’t read them the rights. They didn’t talk. They were terrorists. It was over. Today, Iraq is Harvard for terrorism. You want to be a terrorist, you go to Iraq.
Christopher Hitchens used to say that anyone who would content themselves with saying only that Saddam Hussein was “a bad guy” did not know anything about that man, his regime, or Iraq, and that rule can be safely said to hold in this case. It does accidentally contain a truth, however: If you “want to be a terrorist, you go to Iraq,” was in fact a well-known maxim for international terrorists for many decades.
A Long Trail of Murder
Sabri al-Banna (Abu Nidal) had many paymasters and agendas in his career as the most infamous international terrorist before Usama bin Ladin, but in preparation for that career and then for long stretches of it he was sheltered by Saddam. Hitchens met al-Banna in 1976 in Iraq, where he threatened Said Hammami, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) representative to Britain and a moderate who had publicly promoted a two-state solution long before it was acceptable in Palestinian politics. Hammami was struck down in London on 4 January 1978 by a member of the Abu Nidal Organization (ANO). This was just one of many crimes Saddam enabled al-Banna to commit.
Al-Banna departed Iraq to Assad’s Syria in 1979, but returned to Saddam’s realm in March 1982, after he had acquired the moniker of “the Arab world’s foremost terrorist.” It was from Baghdad that al-Banna attempted to murder Shlomo Argov, Israel’s ambassador to London, sparking Israel’s invasion of Lebanon to dismantle the PLO’s state-within-a-state. Al-Banna had been assisted by his cousin, Marwan al-Banna, and an Iraqi intelligence officer, Nawaf al-Rosan. The assassination was, by al-Banna’s own effective admission (p. 240), directed from Baghdad, and was intended to—and succeeding in—damaging to the strategic standing and military capacity of Saddam’s great rival in Damascus that had heretofore had almost unchallenged primacy over Lebanon. The other intended outcome—to divert Clerical Iran to “resistance” against Israel, rather than being willing to continue fighting the Iran-Iraq War—failed.
A wave of assassinations and attempted assassinations then followed from the ANO against Jordanian, Kuwaiti, and Emirati officials. There is every reason to believe that the attacks against Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates especially were, at the least, encouraged by Saddam since those two states were making overtures to normalize their relations with the Iranian revolution that Saddam was then at war with.
Al-Banna departed Iraq again in November 1983—though parts of his organization remained there—and again put himself at the service of Hafez al-Assad. Though the Assad regime is now presenting itself as a victim and opponent of terrorism, before geopolitical amnesia set in the regime was known for carrying the near-unique attribute of having sponsored terrorism against every single one of its neighbours. Assad’s bugbear in the mid-1980s was Jordan—which was showing dangerous signs of making peace with Israel—so al-Banna was directed to blow up her diplomatic outposts and murder her diplomats, which he duly did from India to Spain.
Al-Banna would, in 1987, take up residence in Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya—another bizarrely lamented government (including by Trump) whose record as a global, long-standing state-sponsor of terrorism has been clumsily revised—where al-Banna ended up massacring most of ANO’s members after being deceived into thinking his organization was riddled with spies. Al-Banna was reported to be in Egypt in the summer of 1998, and finally came back to Iraq in December 1998. The curtain finally came down for al-Banna in August 2002: a suicide, reported Saddam’s regime, wherein he had shot himself three times in the head.
Wadi Haddad, the deputy leader of George Habash’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its head of foreign operations, is the man “chiefly responsible for exporting Palestinian terrorism to Europe” (p. 246). The first PFLP action was the July 1968 hijacking of an El Al 707 that was forced to land in Algiers, and freed sixteen Palestinians after a month-long negotiation with Israel. Haddad was shortly after this recruited as a fully-fledged agent by the KGB. In March 1972, Habash formally renounced international terrorism, a position bitterly contested by a Haddad-led wing of the PFLP, which broke away and formed the Special Operations Group. It was in Saddam’s Baghdad that Haddad’s pro-terrorism faction found haven (p. 250).
Haddad directed the two most spectacular terrorist operations of the 1970s out of Baghdad: the 21 December 1975 takeover of the meeting of the OPEC oil ministers in Vienna and the 27 June 1976 hijacking of an Air France plane that ended a week later with the Entebbe raid on 4 July. On the ground, the OPEC attack was led by a man nearly as notorious as al-Banna, the Venezuelan terrorist and mercenary Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, much better known as “Carlos the Jackal,” who was a close associate of Haddad’s. Long believed to be a Qaddafi-supported attack, Sanchez biographer David Yallop is among those who names Saddam as the “real culprit” (p. 424).
Haddad and Sanchez fell out after the operation. Haddad had ordered that the oil ministers be released one-by-one after making an obeisance to the Palestinian cause, except for the Iranian and Saudi ministers who were to be killed. Sanchez instead ransomed the two captives for a large sum, and Haddad dismissed Sanchez from his “operational teams” (p. 254). Haddad died in March 1978 after being poisoned months earlier by MOSSAD via Belgian chocolates and was buried in Iraq. Haddad’s men retained (p. 142) residence in, and assistance from, Saddam’s regime into the 1990s.
Sanchez has denied that Saddam was involved in the Vienna operation, but this was not his only link to the Iraqi Ba’ath regime. In September 1976, after Sanchez was deported from Jugoslavija, it was to Baghdad he was transferred (p. 107-109), where he was “put up free of charge, … provided with bodyguards, and chauffeured American limousine,” until he decided to move on several weeks later. In December 1977, Sanchez travelled (p. 111) again to Baghdad, this time in the company of Libyan intelligence officers, meeting Saddam personally and forging a relationship that made Saddam one of the first Arab rulers to support Sanchez, “with the blessing of the KGB-trained members of Iraq’s most powerful secret service,” the Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) or Mukhabarat.
Sanchez resurfaced in the Iraqi context in the run-up to Operation DESERT STORM. In 1990-91, as Saddam sought to retain his conquest in Kuwait, he tasked various actors to conduct terrorist attacks (p. 37-42) against U.S. targets worldwide; Sanchez was believed at the time to be one such cutout. Sanchez was arrested in Sudan in 1994 and transferred to French prison, where he made his admiration for Bin Ladin known and came to the conclusion a number of far-Leftists have: the working class has let down the revolutionaries and the wave of the future is jihadism.