Here’s an article in Jane’s (the defense and intelligence bible) which says that Israeli military intelligence thinks the state sponsor behind the WTC attacks is Iraq. Actually, Iraq in concert with al-Qaeda (bin Laden’s network) and a terrorist mastermind from yesteryear named Imad Mughniyeh. (You can find a similar article from a considerably more questionable source here.)
US sources have been reporting that the apparent ringleader of the recent attacks, Mohamed Atta, met an Iraqi intelligence agent in Germany. But the US seems to be playing down this angle, at least for now.
This raises a slew of questions.
The first (and I say this as a Jew and a staunch, though Oslo-philic, zionist) is that you don’t have to think too long to come up with reasons why folks at Israeli military intelligence might want to get people looking in the direction of Iraq and particularly at one of their arch-enemies, Mughniyeh. It’s one thing to tell this to the US government. The standard is much lower for leaking such info to the press. And these sorts of ops tend to be so complex and tie together so many different kinds of people that it may be largely a matter of intepretation saying who’s really involved and who’s not.
Doesn’t mean it’s not true, just something to keep in mind.
On the other hand, if the question is, who has better penetration of Islamic radical groups, the Americans or the Israelis? That’s not too hard a question to answer, is it? And I have my own very well placed sources who think this sort of non-Osama-centric scenario is very, very plausible.
Second, it’s not completely clear to me why Iraq would want to involve itself in something like this. Don’t get me wrong: I wouldn’t put anything past Saddam Hussein. But at heart I think he is all about survival and power, not ideology and certainly not Islam. He plays the Islamist card occasionally, but in an entirely cynical way. Getting caught with a hand in something like this would lead to a devastating response from us militarily, and deeply undermine his efforts to get France and Russia to get sanctions lifted. And it’s not completely clear what the Iraqis gain if no one knows they did it. Again, not saying it didn’t happen; and there are many good answers to the questions I’ve raised. (They did after all try to assassinate then-ex-President Bush in the early 1990s.)
But again, just worth considering.
Third, if the web of interconnections sketched out in the Jane’s article is accurate, then you’ve got something which really changes our understanding of the situation. That is, a confluence of Islamist terrorist organizations, secular terrorist organizations, and secular Arab states like Iraq working in concert.
