Cheney is Absolutely Correct
On the Rush Limbaugh radio program, VP Cheney restated his position that Saddam had ties to al Qaeda. The Vice President is completely correct. Specifically, he spoke of Abu Mus’ab al Zarqawi’s presence in Iraq before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom. As much as a year earlier, al Qaeda affiliated jihadists lead by Zarqawi began aggressive attacks on the Kurdish regions in the north of Iraq. Why would this committed jihadist leader bring his fighters to Iraq to attack Saddam’s enemies?
While researching for our new eBook Both In One Trench we realized that there seems to be a confluence of prominent terrorists emanating from Kuwait after it was occupied by Saddam’s armies. Many of these men are of Palestinian ethnicity. The Palestinians living in Kuwait had favored Saddam because he was a prominent proponent of the Palestinian cause. Their allegiance to Saddam was so thorough that the Kuwaiti government kicked out its Palestinian population after liberation because they collaborated with Saddam. Saddam’s support of Palestinian terrorism is incontrovertible.
A large number of these Palestinians, over a hundred thousand, made their way to Jordan where they began to radicalize the moderate Jordanian population. One of these Palestinians - part of the Palestinian migration from Kuwait which has been termed the “returnees from Kuwait” - was Sheik Abu-Mohammed al-Maqdisi (or Isam Mohammad Taher al-Barqawi). He would later become a major al Qaeda leader.
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Our research points to these Palestinian-Jordanian “returnees” as one of many portals of influence between Saddam and the global Islamic jihad movement. Other portals of influence to the movement include Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (Islamic Party) and Mulla Omar (Taliban) in Afghanistan, Maulana Fazlur Rahman and his jihad political parties in Pakistan, Hassan al Turabi and his National Islamic Front followers in Sudan, and Ayman al Zawahiri himself with the Egyptian Islamic Jihad, and later when it became al Qaeda along with Bin Laden’s followers.
To not see the portals means averting the eyes. Too many people who should know better have done so.
Read the whole thing.
I’m always fascinated at the ability of the left to deny what is so obvious: For so many reasons, fighting the terrorists in Iraq, and freeing the Iraqi people to determine their own fate is exactly what we should be doing.