Oil-for-Terror?

Claudia Rossett of the Weekly Standard has done some serious digging on the U.N.'s corrupt oil-for-food program in Iraq, the story the mainstream press seems willing to ignore (a tip o' the hat to The Key Monk for pointing me to Rossett's work). The basic gist of the program was to allow Iraq to sell oil to purchase food for its people; unfortunately, Saddam set up the program to funnel profits from oil sales to himself, with something akin to a wink from the U.N. The General Accounting Office has estimated that Saddam earned as much as $10 billion in illicit profits for himself.

But Rosset goes a bit further in connecting the dots on the story -- all the way to al Qaeda. She points out that the scum of the Earth weren't exactly rolling in dough when they arrived in Afghanistan:

In 1996, Sudan kicked out bin Laden. He went to Afghanistan, arriving there pretty much bankrupt, according to the 9/11 Commission report. His family inheritance was gone, his allowance had been cut off, and Sudan had confiscated his local assets. Yet, just two years later, bin Laden was back on his feet, feeling strong enough to issue a public declaration of war on America. In February 1998, in a London-based Arabic newspaper, Al-Quds al-Arabi, he published his infamous fatwa exhorting Muslims to "kill the Americans and plunder their money." Six months later, in August 1998, al Qaeda finally went ahead with its long-planned bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Bin Laden was back in the saddle, and over the next three years he shaped al Qaeda into the global monster that finally struck on American soil. His total costs, by the estimates of the 9/11 Commission report, ran to tens of millions of dollars. Even for a terrorist beloved of extremist donors, that's a pretty good chunk of change.

The commission report says bin Laden got his money from sources such as a "core group of financial facilitators" in the Gulf states, especially corrupt charities. But the report concludes: "To date, we have not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9/11 attack. Al Qaeda had many sources of funding and a pre-9/11 annual budget estimated at $30 million. If a particular source of funds had dried up, al Qaeda could easily have found enough money elsewhere to fund the attack."

Some might say there's no link established, just a set of circumstances. But Rossett points to more circumstances:

Oil-for-Food was set up as a limited and temporary measure, starting
operations in late 1996 with somewhat ad hoc administration by the U.N., and a
mandate that had to be renewed by the Security Council every six months or so.
Less than a year into the program, however, on October 15, 1997, U.N. Secretary
General Kofi Annan consolidated Oil-for-Food into what was effectively a
permanent U.N. department--the Office of the Iraq Programme (OIP)--headed by a long-serving U.N. official, Benon Sevan. The Security Council still had to renew
the mandate twice a year, but the process became routine.

...It was a busy time for al Qaeda as well. That same day, February 23,
1998, Osama bin Laden published his "Kill the Americans" fatwa. An intriguing
feature of this fatwa was its prominent mention of Iraq, not just once, but four
times. Analysts at the CIA and elsewhere have long propounded the theory that
secular Saddam and religious Osama would not have wanted to work together. But
Saddam's secular style seemed to bother bin Laden not a whit.

His fatwa presented three basic complaints. Mainly, he deplored the infidel
presence in Saudi Arabia (i.e., the U.S. troops stationed there during and after
the Gulf War). He also cited grievances about Jerusalem, while not even
bothering to mention the Palestinians by name. The rest of his attention, bin
Laden devoted to Iraq and "the Americans' continuing aggression against the
Iraqi people" as well as "the great devastation inflicted on the Iraqi people by
the crusader-Zionist alliance" and--here is the specific reference to U.S.-led
sanctions--"the protracted blockade imposed after the ferocious war."

Two paragraphs later, bin Laden picked up this theme again, calling Iraq
the "strongest neighboring Arab state" of Saudi Arabia, and then citing Iraq,
yet again, as first on a list of four states threatened by America--the other
three being Saudi Arabia (bin Laden's old home and a big source of terrorist
funding), Egypt (birthplace of the terrorist Muslim Brotherhood and of bin
Laden's top lieutenant, Ayman al Zawahiri, who also signed the fatwa), and Sudan
(bin Laden's former base).

UNTIL 1998, Iraq had not loomed large in bin Laden's rants. Why, then, such
stress on Iraq, at that particular moment, in declaring war on America? It is
certainly possible that bin Laden simply figured Iraq had become another good
selling point, a handy way to whip up anger at the United States. But it is at
least intriguing that the month after bin Laden's fatwa, in March 1998, as the
9/11 Commission reports, two al Qaeda members visited Baghdad. And in July 1998, "an Iraqi delegation traveled to Afghanistan to meet first with the Taliban and then with bin Laden."

The next time someone says there's no link between Saddam and al Qaeda, let's remember that the 9/11 Commission established that links did exist. Let's further remember that not all of the evidence on matters such as this can be clear-cut -- if we had acted on limited intel to arrest a group of men carrying boxcutters into airports on the morning of September 11th, it might have been difficult to convict them of attempted mass murder. And finally, before anyone says that corruption in the Oil-for-Food program might have been discovered and the program shut down without a war, let's remember that no one knew about the corruption, and the U.N. didn't even shut down the program after Saddam booted the inspectors.

It doesn't take a lot of imagination to envision some of that $10 billion finding its way into bin Laden's pockets and funding 9/11. The real question is whether any such discovery would convince people of why it was important to go into Iraq, even if we never find WMD.