Palin, Iraq and 9/11
By Colin Kahl
Yesterday, on the seventh anniversary of Sept. 11, Alaska Gov. and vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin gave a speech to an Alaska brigade that includes her son and is about to head off to Iraq. Palin told the troops they were going to "defend the innocent from the enemies who planned and carried out and rejoiced in the death of thousands of Americans."
A story in The Post this morning declares: "Palin Links Iraq to Sept. 11 in Talk to Troops in Alaska." The blurb on the washingtonpost.com homepage reads: "GOP's VP nominee expresses a view now discarded by White House."
But did she? Linking Saddam Hussein's regime to Sept. 11 is a view discarded by Bush. But Palin didn't do that (at least not explicitly).
Bill Kristol over at the Weekly Standard has pounced on The Post's interpretation as profoundly unfair, arguing, "Palin is evidently saying that American soldiers are going to Iraq to defend innocent Iraqis from al Qaeda in Iraq, a group that is related to al Qaeda, which did plan and carry out the Sept. 11 attacks." Well, that too is not what Palin said. She was not evoking the transitive property of responsibility for 9/11. She said the troops were going off to fight "the enemies who planned and carried out" the attacks, not "enemies with links to the group that planned and carried out" the attacks.
Whatever al-Qaeda in Iraq's current links to al-Qaeda Central, they were not the ones who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. Al-Qaeda in Iraq did not exist on Sept. 11, 2001. The group formed in 2004 after the United States invaded Iraq. Indeed, in 2001, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the group's founder, was more a rival to Osama Bin Laden than an ally. In the aftermath of the U.S. invasion, however, Zarqawi opportunistically established an al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq to increase the profile of his terrorist organization. But it is beyond dispute that no members of al-Qaeda in Iraq "planned or carried out" the Sept. 11 attacks. Those guys resided in Afghanistan and now camp out along the Afghanistan/Pakistan border. Moreover, over the past year, al-Qaeda in Iraq has been degraded to the point where it is probably "strategically defeated." As a result, al-Qaeda Central is devoting more and more of its energy to Afghanistan/Pakistan. Taken together, these facts make it difficult to sustain the claim that Iraq was, or is, the central front in the war on terrorism.
So, besides being literally and factually incorrect, Palin's comment belies a deeper analytical misunderstanding that she shares with President Bush and her running mate: a conflation of Iraq and Sept. 11 used to justify a continued strategic over-commitment in Iraq and a diversion of resources away from fighting the folks who actually carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. Continuing to send U.S. troops to Iraq might be important for other reasons -- humanitarian concerns or Iraq's pivotal geopolitical position in the Middle East, for example -- but the war can not, and should not, be justified on the grounds that it is necessary to go after the people who attacked us seven years ago.