MAKING THE CONNECTION

Al Qaeda's credibility 'on the line' (David R. Sands, 4/24/03, THE WASHINGTON TIMES)

Al Qaeda and its terrorist allies remain a potent threat, but their failure to carry out a successful strike during the U.S.-led military campaign to topple Saddam Hussein has raised questions about their ability to carry out major new attacks.

The fears of senior Bush administration officials and private terrorism analysts that al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden would attempt to "hijack" Muslim opposition to the Iraq war with a spectacular new attack have proved unfounded, even with American generals now occupying Saddam's Baghdad palaces.

"I think their credibility is increasingly on the line the longer we go without a successful terrorist strike," said Mark Burgess, director of the Terrorism Project at the Center for Defense Information.

"We know al Qaeda is a patient lot, but I don't know if they can afford to be too patient," he said. "Bin Laden made a lot of noise before the war about defending the Iraqi people, and so far there's nothing to show for it."

Despite a few suicide bombings that targeted U.S. forces in Iraq, speculation that Saddam's regime would resort to widespread terrorist attacks to disrupt the coalition campaign also did not pan out.

The link between the war in Iraq and the larger post-September 11 war on terrorism has been one of the most contested battlegrounds in the debate over toppling Saddam.

There's an opportunity here that we in the West should seize on: we should announce that there were no discernible operational connections between Saddam and al Qaeda, but that we toppled him as a result of 9-11 anyway and will topple Bashir Assad if there's another attack, then Muammar Qaddafi if there's another, and so forth... Our policy should clearly be reprisals not just against al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, but the regimes they support, regardless of whether those regimes aide them. Let al Qaeda not only have to explain why they've been so ineffectual but how they've actually been a detriment to their own vision of an Islamicist/pan-Arab Middle East. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 24, 2003 12:33 PM