Feeding the Minotaur Our strange relationship with the terrorists continues.


As long as the mythical Athenians were willing to send, every nine years, seven maidens and seven young men down to King Minos's monster in the labyrinth, Athens was left alone by the Cretan fleet. The king rightly figured that harvesting just enough Athenians would remind them of their subservience without leading to open rebellion — as long as somebody impetuous like a Theseus didn't show up to wreck the arrangement.

Ever since the storming of the Tehran embassy in November 1979 we Americans have been paying the same sort of human tribute to grotesque Islamofascists. Over the last 25 years a few hundred of our own were cut down in Lebanon, East Africa, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Yemen, and New York on a semi-annual basis, even as the rules of the tribute to be paid — never spoken, but always understood — were rigorously followed.

In exchange for our not retaliating in any meaningful way against the killers — addressing their sanctuaries in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, or Syria, or severing their financial links in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia — Hezbollah, al Qaeda, and their various state-sanctioned kindred operatives agreed to keep the number killed to reasonable levels. They were to reap their lethal harvests abroad and confine them mostly to professional diplomats, soldiers, or bumbling tourists, whose disappearance we distracted Americans would predictably chalk up to the perils of foreign service and exotic travel.

Despite the occasional fiery rhetoric, both sides found the informal Minoan arrangement mutually beneficial. The terrorists believed that they were ever so incrementally, ever so insidiously eroding America's commitment to a pro-Western Middle East. We offered our annual tribute so that over the decades we could go from Dallas to Extreme Makeover and Madonna to Britney without too much distraction or inconvenience.

But then a greedy, over-reaching bin Laden wrecked the agreement on September 11. Or did he?

Murdering 3,000 Americans, destroying a city block in Manhattan, and setting fire to the Pentagon were all pretty tough stuff. And for a while it won fascists and their state sponsors an even tougher response in Afghanistan and Iraq that sent hundreds to caves and thousands more to paradise. And when we have gotten serious in the postbellum reconstruction, thugs like Mr. Sadr have backed down. But before we gloat and think that we've overcome our prior laxity and proclivity for appeasement, let us first make sure we are not still captives to the Minotaur's logic.

True, al Qaeda is now scattered, the Taliban and Saddam gone. But the calculus of a quarter century — threaten, hit, pause, wait; threaten, hit, pause, wait — is now entrenched in the minds of Middle Eastern murderers. Indeed, the modus operandi that cynically plays on Western hopes, liberalism, and fair play is gospel now to all sorts of bin Laden epigones — as we have seen in Madrid, Fallujah, and Najaf.

Much has been written about our problems with this postmodern war and why we find it so difficult to fully mobilize our formidable military and economic clout to crush the terrorists and their patrons. Of course, we have no identifiable conventional enemy such as Hitler's Panzers; we are not battling a fearsome nation that defiantly declared war on us, such as Tojo's Japan; and we are no longer a depression-era, disarmed, impoverished United States at risk for our very survival. But then, neither Hitler nor Mussolini nor Tojo nor Stalin ever reached Manhattan and Washington.

So al Qaeda is both worse and not worse than the German Nazis: It is hardly the identifiable threat of Hitler's Wehrmacht, but in this age of technology and weapons of mass destruction it is more able to kill more Americans inside the United States. Whereas we think our fascist enemies of old were logical and conniving, too many of us deem bin Laden's new fascists unhinged — their fatwas, their mythology about strong and weak horses, and their babble about the Reconquista and the often evoked "holy shrines" are to us dreamlike.

But I beg to differ somewhat.

I think the Islamists and their supporters do not live in an alternate universe, but instead are no more crazy in their goals than Hitler was in thinking he could hijack the hallowed country of Beethoven and Goethe and turn it over to buffoons like Goering, prancing in a medieval castle in reindeer horns and babbling about mythical Aryans with flunkies like Goebbels and Rosenberg. Nor was Hitler's fatwa — Mein Kampf — any more irrational than bin Laden's 1998 screed and his subsequent grainy infomercials. Indeed, I think Islamofascism is brilliant in its reading of the postmodern West and precisely for that reason it is dangerous beyond all description — in the manner that a blood-sucking, stealthy, and nocturnal Dracula was always spookier than a massive, clunky Frankenstein.

Like Hitler's creed, bin Ladenism trumpets contempt for bourgeois Western society. If once we were a "mongrel" race of "cowboys" who could not take casualties against the supermen of the Third Reich, now we are indolent infidels, channel surfers who eat, screw, and talk too much amid worthless gadgetry, godless skyscrapers, and, of course, once again, the conniving Jews.

Like Hitler, bin Ladenism has an agenda: the end of the liberal West. Its supposedly crackpot vision is actually a petrol-rich Middle East free of Jews, Christians, and Westerners, free to rekindle spiritual purity under Sharia. Bin Laden's al Reich is a vast pan-Arabic, Taliban-like caliphate run out of Mecca by new prophets like him, metering out oil to a greedy West in order to purchase the weapons of its destruction; there is, after all, an Israel to be nuked, a Europe to be out-peopled and cowered, and an America to be bombed and terrorized into isolation. This time we are to lose not through blood and iron, but through terror and intimidation: televised beheadings, mass murders, occasional bombings, the disruption of commerce, travel, and the oil supply.

In and of itself, our enemies' ambitions would lead to failure, given the vast economic and military advantages of the West. So to prevent an all out, terrible response to these predictable cycles of killing Westerners, there had to be some finesse to the terrorists' methods. The trick was in preventing some modern Theseus from going into the heart of the Labyrinth to slay the beast and end the nonsense for good.

It was hard for the Islamic fascists to find ideological support in the West, given their agenda of gender apartheid, homophobia, religious persecution, racial hatred, fundamentalism, polygamy, and primordial barbarism. But they sensed that there has always been a current of self-loathing among the comfortable Western elite, a perennial search for victims of racism, economic oppression, colonialism, and Christianity. Bin Laden's followers weren't white; they were sometimes poor; they inhabited of former British and French colonies; and they weren't exactly followers of the no-nonsense Pope or Jerry Falwell. If anyone doubts the nexus between right-wing Middle Eastern fascism and left-wing academic faddishness, go to booths in the Free Speech area at Berkeley or see what European elites have said and done for Hamas. Middle Eastern fascist killers enshrined as victims alongside our own oppressed? That has been gospel in our universities for the last three decades.

Like Hitler, bin Ladenism grasped the advantages of hating the Jews. It has been 60 years since the Holocaust; memories dim. Israel is not poor and invaded but strong, prosperous, and unapologetic. It is high time, in other words, to unleash the old anti-Semitic infectious bacillus. Thus Zionists caused the latest Saudi bombings, just as they have poisoned Arab-American relations, just as neo-conservatives hijacked American policy, just as Feith, Perle, and Wolfowitz cooked up this war.

Finally, bin Laden understood the importance of splitting the West, just like the sultan of old knew that a Europe trisected into Orthodoxy, Catholicism, and Protestantism would fight among itself rather than unite against a pan-Islamic foe. Hit the Spanish and bring in an anti-American government. Leave France and Germany alone for a time so they can blame the United States for mobilizing against a "nonexistent" threat, unleashing the age-old envy and jealously of the American upstart.

If after four years of careful planning, al Qaedists hit the Olympics in August, the terrorists know better than we do that most Europeans will do nothing — but quickly point to the U.S. and scream "Iraq!" And they know that the upscale crowds in Athens are far more likely to boo a democratic America than they are a fascist Syria or theocratic Iran. Just watch.

In the European mind, and that of its aping American elite, the terrorists lived, slept, and walked in the upper aether — never the streets of Kabul, the mosques of Damascus, the palaces of Baghdad, the madrassas of Saudi Arabia, or the camps of Iran. To assume that the latter were true would mean a real war, real sacrifice, and a real choice between the liberal bourgeois West and a Dark-Age Islamofascist utopia.

While all Westerners prefer the bounty of capitalism, the delights of personal freedom, and the security of modern technological progress, saying so and not apologizing for it — let alone defending it — is, well, asking a little too much from the hyper sophisticated and cynical. Such retrograde clarity could cost you, after all, a university deanship, a correspondent billet in Paris or London, a good book review, or an invitation to a Georgetown or Malibu A-list party.

Nearly three years after 9/11 we are in the strangest of all paradoxes: a war against fascists that we can easily win but are clearly not ready to fully wage. We have the best 500,000 soldiers in the history of civilization, a resolute president, and an informed citizenry that has already received a terrible preemptive blow that killed thousands.

Yet what a human comedy it has now all become.

The billionaire capitalist George Soros — who grew fabulously wealthy through cold and calculating currency speculation, helping to break many a bank and its poor depositors — now makes the moral equation between 9/11 and Abu Ghraib. For this ethicist and meticulous accountant, 3,000 murdered in a time of peace are the same as some prisoners abused by renegade soldiers in a time of war.

Recently in the New York Times I read two articles about the supposedly new irrational insensitivity toward Muslims and saw an ad for a book detailing how the West "constructed" and exaggerated the Islamic menace — even as the same paper ran a quieter story about a state-sponsored cleric in Saudi Arabia's carefully expounding on the conditions under which Muslims can desecrate the bodies of murdered infidels.

Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats — Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry — employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. "Lies," "worst," and " betrayed" are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon — precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, we see the same old bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings, the obligatory pause, the faux negotiations, the lies — and then, of course, the bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings...

No, bin Laden is quite sane — but lately I have grown more worried that we are not.

— Victor Davis Hanson, an NRO contributor, is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and author of The Soul of Battle and Carnage and Culture, among other books. His website is http://www.victorhanson.com.

And your point is???

That the Bush bashers here are puppets of the self serving.


This pararaph sums it up well.


"Aristocratic and very wealthy Democrats — Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, Howard Dean, and John Kerry — employ the language of conspiracy to assure us that we had no reason to fight Saddam Hussein. "Lies," "worst," and " betrayed" are the vocabulary of their daily attacks. A jester in stripes like Michael Moore, who cannot tell the truth, is now an artistic icon — precisely and only because of his own hatred of the president and the inconvenient idea that we are really at war. Our diplomats court the Arab League, which snores when Russians and Sudanese kill hundreds of thousands of Muslims but shrieks when we remove those who kill even more of their own. And a depopulating, entitlement-expanding Europe believes an American president, not bin Laden, is the greatest threat to world peace. Russia, the slayer of tens of thousands of Muslim Chechans and a big-time profiteer from Baathist loot, lectures the United States on its insensitivity to the new democracy in Baghdad.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Iraq, and the rest of the Middle East, we see the same old bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings, the obligatory pause, the faux negotiations, the lies — and then, of course, the bloodcurdling threats, the horrific videos, the bombings...

No, bin Laden is quite sane — but lately I have grown more worried that we are not. "

Sounds like that whole "kettle and pot introduction" thing.

Sure does.

Of course, it's probably because we clearly have no understanding of the issue.

Dans,

That issue is the war on terror. You have demonstrated this a few times. How about a test then? Give me a paragraph on the historyof driving religous doctrine of Al Queda and its global effects outside of Al Queda in Afghanistan?

Sorry, Professor King, but I only do research for my own needs these days. I already have my degree, so I'm not really looking for extra credit at this time.

Agreed. No sense understanding the cause when it's more fun complaining about the effect.

He that would Fish, must venture his bait.

Ben Franklin

Oh, I'm sure you have a perfect understanding of the cause of virtually anything.

If I need confirmation of anything, I'll just ask you.

Dans,

Thanks Happy to help. :p


"Reading does the mind good"

I read plenty. I'm pretty sure I understand what I read most of the time.

I just have zero interest in comparing my conclusions to yours, and being told I clearly have no understanding of the subject.

So don't throw your arm out..........

I forgot I was twisting your arm to post. Backing up your statements is not required but optional here I noticed. Just admit you know little about the root cause, the nuts and bolts of the war on terror and that your stand is from a cursory glance and personal bias and we will be cool. :p

No, I won't admit that.

Now, if you want to admit that your knowledge is matched only by your arrogance, I'll gladly agree with you.

After all, I'm sure your interviews with Al Qaeda members has given you insight none of the rest of us is privy to.

You'll argue the economy with an economist, you'll argue religion with a Theologian, you'll argue the greenhouse effect with an Atmospheric Scientist, you'll argue legal matters with Supreme Court Justices, you'll argue logic with a Philosopher..............all I'm sure because they, like me, clearly have no understanding of the subject.

Face it, debating with you is always pointless because you simply will not admit that you're ever wrong, or just unsure, or simply have a different opinion.

You're obviously well educated and well informed. A little humility would serve you well, though.

Dan,

Why does it have to be about right or wrong? How about difference of opinion where the debate stimulates the other to think about things they have yet to think about or research why they think they do. I have yet seen a post from you where you admit to being wrong. Whats your saying "Pot meet kettle?" why is that important ,we do not even know each other

You posted a passive agressive comment about not knowing anything directed at my challenge from days ago that few have a real or deep understanding of the root cause of the war on terror. I challeneged that passive agressive tactic and asked you to assert your knowledge on the subject. You walked and tried to turn it into a debate about right and wrong, me and you. AI find that weak and I have come to expect more form you this past few months. At least be like the others on this subject and point to the 35 year old corporate profit motive arguement or it's about the oil or even it the crusades all over again angle . At least that says I have not got a clue but I don't want to admit it. I have read at least several 1000 books and articles about the war on terror and the players since 911. I will not let someone that has not at least put in some effort tell me I do not know what I am talking about with out a stiff challenge. If that puts some off they should stick to whatever they do know about. In my family we read at least 4 hours a day ,each and everyone of us. So we can talk about just about any subject you want to bring up intelligently and either admit or walk away when we cannot. It's a fault that I assume others do the same.

Gadfly.

Gh,

You are going to make me cry. back at ya!

douche bag
Function: noun
slang : an unattractive or offensive person

That might be true, but you won't find many threads where I insist I'm right either. That's because we don't often debate whether 2 + 2 = 4, we debate things that aren't that clear-cut.

I'm not always right, but I will admit when I'm stating my opinion.

When you state 2+2=5, we can have a big ol' debate. If you wanna argue that 5 is better than 4, or that Christianity is better than Bhuddism, then I may comment but I won't debate. I'm not scared to, or too ill-informed........I just don't see much point in it.

Then why be here or post to controversial topics specifially to an individual. I would think you would want to keep it in general. Or do you like poking at people but not being jabbed back? I admit if someone slaps me I punch back because I figure why slap someone unless you are willing to go to the mat.

More violence?

Emotion?

I'll go a few rounds..........but just for fun. I'm not here to change anyone's mind, or the world itself.........it's just fun to debate the points.

But I'm not looking for a raise, a job, a degree, or your approval........so you'll forgive me if I don't get too involved.

[QUOTEacting like asses.] [/QUOTE]


And AuntyM you are acting like>?

God bless you and every American with the intestinal fortitude to admit when they have made a mistake with their vote.

Why does it always come down to a lie or some big scheme to screw the people? Generally by the less informed? Even Bill Clinton said last week that Bush has never lied he has done exactly what he said he would do in the campaign.

Of all the people I talk with even the most conservative do not call Clinton a liar or do they feel he lied to the American people about anything except Lewinski. He just has different views and values on certain issues. Even Al Gore who I feel is the worst thing for this country as a presidential hopeful since Bob Dole. I think he parses his words but it easy to see what he is saying and I doubt he lies.

Whats up with all this accusation of lies and conspiracy ?

I try to avoid name-calling, but TK's ongoing disdain for anyone who disagrees with him leaves me not caring.

Gas bag = TK

From TK's post: "I have read at least several 1000 books and articles about the war on terror and the players since 911. . . . In my family we read at least 4 hours a day . . ."

Tk,

It's fairly obvious that you're a well informed, even if I think it's mis-informed about some things, individual. And maybe you're even a speed reader. But 9/11 was only 1,008 days ago. Please tell me again how many thousand books and articles you've read on the war on terror and the players involved in just over 1,000 days. Even at 4 hours or more per day.

Your statements about basic information are not credible. I doubt this will help you understand why your statements about even more complex topics are not credible to many of us, since you NEVER admit being wrong or making an error.

Furthermore, simply consuming a large quantity of reading material doesn't necessarily make you: right, better informed, or having a clearer understanding of the issue of the war on terror. The quality of your reading material is at least as important, if not more so, than the quantity. It comes down to reasoned analysis for independent thinkers. Generally I find that I disagree with your analysis and conclusions, or the analysis - if any - of the authors of your reading material, when you parrot that.

You think I don't have a clue. I do think I have a clue, and then some. You may be right. I may be right. Neither of us may be right. But in your simple world there is only one right and wrong. And you are always right. And everyone who disagrees with you is always wrong, or at least doesn't have a clue. I guess it helps keep your world simple that way. Which is apparently the only way you can understand it. If that's the case, I pity you.

For the record, I still generally disagree with you. And I'll revoke calling you a gas bag if you lend some credibility to your statement about reading "several thousand books and articles . . ." in the last 1,008 days.

Sincerely,

Salmo g.

I'm sensing that he will now call you a name and try feebly to discredit your spot-on analysis with neo-conservative hyperbole.

Call it a hunch....

Salmo,

An article a day is 1000. If I just read one a day.

I am able to offer you a list of some of the books. We are online with KCLS and reserve the books and they send them to the local lib. They then call and tell us they have arrived.
Try it you will always have a stack of books.
I have also been given many by my assisatnt. She lived in SA from 12 to 18 and her dad is still a foreign contractor. She reccomends Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia -- by Jean Sasson as her favorite for the truth about life in the ME.

The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (Oxford University Press)
All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the
In the Land of Israel, by Amos Oz (Harcourt Brace)


Karen Armstrong’s Islam, A Short History (Modern Library)
The Koran Interpreted (Simon and Schuster
Taliban (Yale University Press)
Soldiers of God (Vintage)
Arab and Jew: Wounded Spirits in a Promised Land, by David Shipler (Penguin).
From Beirut to Jerusalem, by Thomas Friedman (Anchor).
A History of Israel From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time, by Howard Sachar (Oxford University Press)
A History of the Arab Peoples, by Albert Hourani (Warner Books)
House of Windows, by Adina Hoffman (Broadway Books)
Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer. (John Wiley & Sons)
The Iron Wall, by Avi Shalim (W. W. Norton & Co.)
The Middle East, by Bernard Lewis (Touchstone Books)
Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, by Charles Smith (Bedford/St. Martin's)
A Peace to End All Peace, by David Fromkin (Owl Books)
Power Politics, by Arundhati Roy (South End Press)
Righteous Victims, by Benny Morris (Knopf)
A Short History of the Jewish People from Legendary Times to Modern Statehood, by Raymond P. Scheindlin (Hungry Minds).
Stations of Desire: Love Elegies from Ibn Arabi and New Poems, by Michael Sells (Ibis Editions)
Unholy Wars, by John Cooley (Stylus Publishing, )
Wild Thorns, by Sahar Khalifeh (Interlink Publishing Group)
The Yellow Wind, by David Grossman (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

Salmo,

Here is another that you can question. I have listened to over 10,000 recordings in the area of Jazz, rock and classical music. I once listened to 1000 reel to reel tapes of Jazz recordings in college to get an A in a history of Jazz class. 1000 tapes in one semester End of sept to end of Jan do the math on that one.

WRONG AGAIN

By RICHARD MINITER

June 17, 2004 -- THE 9/11 Commission is in danger of going the way of the Warren Commission — a blue-chip panel investigating a national tragedy that foolishly ends up fueling controversy. And that's a shame. Yesterday, the commission announced there was "no credible evidence" linking Iraq and al Qaeda. In reality, there's a wealth of evidence.

And by disputing the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, the commissioners are answering a question no one asked them. They were supposed to investigate 9/11, not al Qaeda as a whole. In an election year, this makes them look partisan.

The timing of the final report smells fishy, too: 500,000 copies are due in book stores on July 26 — the very day the Democratic convention begins in Boston. Again, not a credibility-enhancing move.

The 9/11 panel seems recklessly naive when it takes the word of the intelligence community as gospel. A wise commissioner would remember that everyone has an institutional interest, a bias. (E.g., for many in the intelligence community, conceding that Iraq could have been one of bin Laden's backers would be admitting that they were wrong for the past decade and wrong to oppose the Iraq war.) And a neutral commissioner would conclude that the jury is still out on Iraq-al Qaeda, not stamp it "case closed."

Yesterday's report itself casts doubt on the intelligence sector's long-held beliefs. Buried in it is an admission that bin Laden sought a partnership with Iraq (among other nations), though it maintains the relationship was never consummated. (How could they know?) This explodes two cherished myths of America's intelligence analysts: that secular dictators and Islamic terrorists would never team up and that al Qaeda is a "loose, stateless network," not a "cut out" for evil regimes. If the CIA's analysts were wrong about that, couldn't they also be wrong about a Saddam-bin Laden link?

A wealth of evidence on the public record — from government reports and congressional testimony to news accounts from major newspapers — attests to longstanding ties between bin Laden and Saddam.


* Abdul Rahman Yasin, a member of the al Qaeda cell that detonated the 1993 World Trade Center bomb, fled to Iraq. U.S. forces recently discovered a cache of documents in Tikrit, Saddam's hometown, that show that Iraq gave Yasin both a home and a salary.

* Bin Laden met eight times with officers of Iraq's Special Security Organization, a secret police agency run by Saddam's son Qusay, and with Saddam's external intelligence service, according to intelligence made public by Secretary of State Colin Powell, at the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 6, 2003.

* Bin Laden met the director of the Iraqi mukhabarat in 1996 in Khartoum, according to Powell.

* An al Qaeda operative now held by the U.S. confessed that in the mid '90s, bin Laden had forged an agreement with Saddam's men to cease all terrorist activities against the Iraqi dictator.

* In October 2000, another Iraqi intelligence operative, Salah Suleiman, was arrested by Pakistani authorities. Suleiman was shuttling between Iraqi intelligence and Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2.

* Spanish investigators have uncovered documents seized from Yusuf Galan — who is charged by a Spanish court with being "directly involved with the preparation and planning" of the Sept. 11 attacks — that show the terrorist was invited to a party at the Iraqi embassy in Madrid. The invitation used his "al Qaeda nom de guerre."

* An Iraqi defector to Turkey, known by his cover name as "Abu Mohammed," told the Sunday Times of London that he saw bin Laden's fighters in Iraq in 1997. At the time, Mohammed was a colonel in Saddam's Fedayeen. He described an encounter at Salman Pak, the training facility southeast of Baghdad, where militants trained to hijack planes with knives — on a full-size Boeing 707.

* In 1998, Abbas al-Janabi, a longtime aide to Saddam's son Uday, defected to the West. At the time, he repeatedly told reporters that there was a direct connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.

* The Sunday Times found a Saddam loyalist in a Kurdish prison who claims to have been Dr. Zawahiri's bodyguard during his 1992 visit with Saddam in Baghdad. Dr. Zawahiri was a close associate of bin Laden at the time.

* Following the defeat of the Taliban, almost two dozen bin Laden associates "converged on Baghdad and established a base of operations there," Powell told the United Nations in February 2003. From their Baghdad base, the secretary said, they supervised the movement of men, materiel and money for al Qaeda's global network.

* Abu Musaab al-Zarqawi oversaw an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. Wounded, he sought medical treatment in Baghdad in May 2002. When he recovered, he restarted a training camp in northern Iraq. Zarqawi's Iraq cell was later tied to the October 2002 murder of Lawrence Foley, a U.S. Agency for International Development official. The captured assassin confessed that he received orders and funds from Zarqawi's cell in Iraq.

* Documents found among the debris of the Iraqi Intelligence Center show that Baghdad funded the Allied Democratic Forces, a Ugandan terror group led by an Islamist cleric linked to bin Laden. According to a London's Daily Telegraph, the organization offered to recruit "youth to train for the jihad" at a "headquarters for international holy warrior network" in Baghdad.

* CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee: "Iraq has in the past provided training in document-forgery and bomb-making to al Qaeda. It also provided training in poisons and gasses to two al Qaeda associates; one of these [al Qaeda] associates characterized the relationship as successful. . . . This information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources."

The 9/11 Commission's work is too important to squander on politics. The nation needs a full, frank assessment of the government-wide failures in the Clinton and Bush years that led to the terrorist attacks — and a sober judge, not a camera-mugging prosecutor. Let's hope the commissioners realize that before July 26.

Richard Miniter is the author of "Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror."