I’ve been getting several emails and comments pointing my way towards articles showing collaboration between the Ba’athists and al-Qaeda. Here’s yet another roundup.

• Here’s an interview on PBS’s Frontline with an Iraqi army captain who claimed to have work at Salman Pak, a base where Iraq trained terrorists to, among other things, hijack planes. This doesn’t directly show a link between 9/11 and Iraq, although the gentleman interviewed believes that Iraq did help behind the scenes.

• The British have reported that Iraqi POWs have claimed that there are al-Qaeda in Iraq fighting against coalition forces.
• The CIA reported shortly before hostilities began in Iraq that al-Qaeda cells were operating freely in Iraq and were planning terror attacks against U.S. forces, which provides some corroboration for the British reports.
• Ha’aretz reports that terrorist attacks in Kenya a year ago were carried about by Iraqi al-Qaeda operatives.
• Michael Ledeen on Zarqawi who runs (ran?) the al-Qaeda cell that operates out of Baghdad.
• This article recounts passages in Iraqi publications that praise bin Laden–which helps to undermine the “Hussein hates Osama” argument.
• Last August, the Telegraph reported that Saddam Hussein had terrorist leader Abu Nidal murdered. (Iraq claimed his death was a “suicide.”) Nidal’s crime? He refused to train al-Qaeda operatives who were residing in Iraq.

As always, if you have more, please feel free to email or leave them in the comments. Likewise, if there’s some info that discredits anything I’ve linked to, again, let me know.

Looks like Peter Jackson’s next movie is spoken for. He’ll be doing a remake of King Kong.

After earning critical and commercial acclaim for two LORD OF THE RINGS films, Universal Pictures has agreed to allow Jackson to remake the classic 1933 RKO Radio Pictures KING KONG. Jackson wrote the script for his version of KONG about five years ago (together with RINGS writing partners Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) but at the time Universal passed on the notion of greenlighting the film. See how things change when your previous two films make a billion dollars at the box office?

“No film has captivated my imagination more than KING KONG,” Jackson said in a press release yesterday. “I’m making movies today because I saw this film when I was 9 years old. It has been my sustained dream to reinterpret this classic story for a new age.

“The story of Kong offers everything that any storyteller could hope for: an archetypal narrative, thrilling action, resonating emotion and memorable characters. It has endured for precisely these reasons and I am honored to be a part of its continuing legacy.”

I’ve never been a King Kong fan. But then, I’m not a big fan of zombie movies, and Dead Alive is one of my favorite movies. And Lord of the Rings speaks for itself. Needless to say, I’ll putting down my $6.50 to see it.

According to Ha’aretz, Iraq may have transferred some of its weapons of mass destruction to Syria. This would not surprise me in the least. Syria and Iraq have a longstanding relationship, including an illegal oil pipeline. And of course, both Syria and Iraq provide money and other material to Hamas, Hezbollah, and others.

Iraqi Republican Guard troops in the northern part of the country are being redirected south to reinforce troops to the south of Baghdad, which are reportedly at half strength. In the meantime, U.S. forces are engaging troops to the south of Baghdad–but not moving much closer to the city itself.

Hmm… I notice that there are still 70,000 Kurdish troops to the North. And now we’re providing them with equipment and other supplies. Question: was the attack on Ansar al-Islam a test of the ability of the Kurds and U.S. Special Ops to work together?

In other words, might we see a pincer movement after all?

Melinda Ammann has a great, if sad, article on how crackdowns on OxyContin and other pain-relieving medications are hurting patients who truly suffer from chronic pain.

“The growing national plague of Oxy addictions, overdoses, and deaths caused by the illegal activity of some doctors, pharmacists, and patients has been focused on like a laser beam by this office and other U.S. attorneys’ offices,” Gene Rossi, a federal prosecutor in Alexandria, Virginia, told The Washington Post in August. “If any person falls into one of those three categories, our office will try our best to root that person out like the Taliban. Stay tuned.”

The menace depicted by drug warriors like Rossi bears little resemblance to the medicine that helps patients keep agony at bay. Thomas Rogers, for instance, is a healthy 31-year-old man — healthy, that is, except for the degenerative disc disease that gives him chronic back pain. He has opted to forgo spinal lumbar fusions, which would involve the removal of natural discs and the insertion of rods or screws in his back, in the hope that a less invasive procedure will soon be available. His pain has been treated effectively with OxyContin by an Atlanta-based physician for three years.

“I would give anything to have a healthy, strong back like most 31-year-olds have,” Rogers says, “but this is the way things are for me, and thankfully OxyContin has given me some sort of a life since I’ve been taking it….As long as I have a good doctor who understands and science can produce meds like OxyContin, life is livable. I could not live with the constant pain in my lower back without the benefits of this drug.”

Ahhh… but since some people abuse the drug, then it must be bad, right? Ugh. Go read the whole thing.

Fred Hiatt has an interesting article pointing out that Clinton and Bush were probably more similar in their “unilateralism” than either would admit.

It is true that Vice President Al Gore flew to Japan to take part in the final, grueling negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and that he was much applauded for taking such a political risk. It is true that Gore signed on to the treaty, which committed the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to below 1990 levels by the year 2012, even as India and China assumed no commitments whatever.

But Gore didn’t really mean it, he explained when he returned to Washington. The administration did not intend to submit the treaty for Senate ratification. Even as it signed the document one year later, it called it a “work in progress”; the signing, The Post explained at the time, was “a largely symbolic act.” Beyond promising that new technologies would reduce greenhouse gas emissions without causing any economic pain, the administration never put forward a plan to reach Kyoto targets.

When it came to the International Criminal Court, Clinton was as worried as Bush about exposing American soldiers to international jurisprudence. He was dissatisfied with concessions his negotiators extracted in the final treaty; he complained about its “significant flaws.” But again he signed it anyway — to “reaffirm our strong support for international accountability,” he said. Then he said he wouldn’t submit the treaty for Senate ratification and would recommend that Bush not do so either.

Clinton was committed to the ABM Treaty with Russia, the primary purpose of which was to outlaw national missile defense. But Clinton also spent much of the last two years of his presidency unsuccessfully trying to persuade the Russians to redefine the treaty precisely to permit national missile defense. “One way or another,” Clinton’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, told his Russian counterpart, according to Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, “NMD was almost certain to proceed.”

Like I said, interesting. There are more similarities beyond that, as well. Both Bush and Clinton have engaged in military operations without the permission of the United Nations, as well (Bush in Iraq; Clinton in Haiti, Iraq, and Kosovo). To be sure, there are differences, too. But I have to say I appreciate Bush’s honesty–to sign treaties you have no intention of ratifying isn’t just bad geopolitics–it’s arguably a violation of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, to which the United States is a party.

The real fighting of this war is going to be Baghdad. I think that everybody has known that from the beginning. And now Sgt. Stryker reports that the Republican Guard is taking off their uniforms and donning civilian clothes in preparaiton for the Baghdad battle.

For some more thoughts about a battle in Baghdad, Daryl Press has a sobering read on what it the risks and benefits there are to coalition forces in urban fighting in Baghdad.

The main question, I suppose, is will the battle of Baghdad be a siege, or nasty street-to-street fighting? I can’t give any answers, because I don’t know. Who knows–maybe there’s an alternative that nobody’s come up with, and the U.S. has developed a tactic that will surprise us all. Maybe the talks with the Republican Guard to surrender will be successful. Maybe some of the Guardsmen will take advantage of their civilian clothing to slip away and not fight. We don’t know.

At this point, all we can do is wait and hope for the best.

(both links via Winds of Change)

Diana Hsieh links to this interesting article from the Arab News’s war correspondent. One interesting bit was this:

When we finally made it to Safwan, Iraq, what we saw was utter chaos. Iraqi men, women and children were playing it up for the TV cameras, chanting: “With our blood, with our souls, we will die for you Saddam.”

I took a young Iraqi man, 19, away from the cameras and asked him why they were all chanting that particular slogan, especially when humanitarian aid trucks marked with the insignia of the Kuwaiti Red Crescent Society, were distributing some much-needed food.

His answer shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did.

He said: “There are people from Baath here reporting everything that goes on. There are cameras here recording our faces. If the Americans were to withdraw and everything were to return to the way it was before, we want to make sure that we survive the massacre that would follow as Baath go house to house killing anyone who voiced opposition to Saddam. In public, we always pledge our allegiance to Saddam, but in our hearts we feel something else.”

Just something to keep in mind. I’m not saying that everybody in Iraq loves us–I’m sure that many don’t. But the point is we don’t really know for sure what they’re really feeling, do we? Not ’til this all plays out.

Dietz Smith over at the excellent blog The Rant links to this article in which several generals are reportedly criticizing Rumsfeld’s plan of battle.

I’m still not convinced that Rumsfeld and Franks (both okayed the plan) made the wrong call. I can think of a number of problems that could emerge with the presence of significantly more troops on the ground at the time the war started. I mean, more troops wouldn’t necessarily have made things happen FASTER. We’d STILL be holding back against the major cities for fear of harming innocents. There’d STILL be suicide bombers. There’d STILL be fedayeen resistance. Iraqi soldiers would STILL be forced to fight at gunpoint.

And more troops means more supplies, more people to move, more vehicles, more chances of friendly fire incidents. Now that we’re bringing them in to hold ground that’s been taken, and Umm Qasr is firmly in our hands, sure, they’ll be beneficial in solidifying our hold on the territory we have and ensuring the integrity of our supply lines.

But what really bothers me is this–by what standard is there a “failure” here? Have we lost territory previously held? No. Have the Iraqis launched a major offensive against us? No. Have they been successful in unleashing weapons of mass destruction against us? No.

I’m not an expert on military tactics or history by any means, but from the reading I have done, it seems to me that a significant amount of success has been achieved. We’ve taken most of Iraq’s territory, achieved complete air dominance, overseen the surrender of two entire Iraqi divisions, wiped out Ansar al-Islam, and apparently did a good job of significantly cutting off communications between Baghdad and troops in the field. All of this in less than two weeks with historically low casualities and civilian deaths. Who knows–maybe more troops on the ground would have made a difference. Fewer casualties, better hold on the territory, etc.

However, it may be that, in some parallel universe, these same generals are criticizing Rumsfeld for “not learning from the success of Afghanistan” in his “overreliance on the Powell Doctrine” by putting too many troops on the field in the initial phases of battle, the result of which failed to cover any significant amount of territory in two weeks and has suffered heavy losses from the use of poison gasses, launched from jets using airfields from central Iraq…

The fact is, we don’t know if more troops would have made the difference. They might have made things better. They might have made things worse. But when people say “Rumsfeld’s plan was a failure,” they need more than military experience to convince. While I deeply respect the men and women in uniform, the argument from authority doesn’t work on me–especially on military matters. Give me objective standards–”what constitutes success” and “what constitutes failure” with good reasons for both. Historical data and parallels a plus. Then I’ll give it a listen.

It’s still far too early to declare this war a “success” or “failure.” All we can do is look at what has been achieved to date, and compare it with the tactical goals of this war and also similar military engagements in the past. To date, with Ansar al-Islam destroyed, a great deal of Iraq’s military crippled, and low civilian and coalition casualites, I think that so far, the war is proceeding well.

“None save great men have been the authors of great heresies.”
– St. Augustine