1) Saddam did have connections with international terrorism. Ok, that is just a fact. $25,000 a piece to suicide bombers, families in Palestine. Funding the Islamic Jihad Organization. Where was the infamous Abu Nidal terror organization based? Baghdad. Where did Al-Qaeda operative and suspected branch leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi go after he was wounded fighting Americans in Afghanistan? A hospital in Baghdad, despite the fact that he is a Jordanian national. You don't just come from Afghanistan to check into one of Saddam's hospitals, its the second most tightly controlled state on the face of the earth. How did the foreign fighters of Ansar-al-Islam arrive in northern Iraq in the 1990's to terrorize the Kurds? They didn't just slip over the border. You couldn't do that, the Mukhabarat was everywhere. They were there fighting a proxy war against the Kurds. Saddam Hussein definitely had connections to terrorists, he used international terrorism as a means to political ends, be they maintaining power in his country or in regional politics.
You can say that Saddam Hussein did not have connections to 9/11. You can say that Saddam did not have connections to al-Qaeda (this is very debatable and I think there are so many documents floating around, and some forgeries, that this will take years to figure out). But you cannot say that Saddam did not have ties to international terrorism and terrorist movements throughout the middle east. He was a major patron of terror. He was on the state department's State Sponsor of Terror list (only 7 nations at the time) throughout the Clinton administration. To say that he had nothing to do with terrorism is a lie and its a white washing of history.
Bush believed that the connections he did have with terror and the presence of weapons of mass destruction that everyone knew he had (as of resolution 1441) presented a clear and present danger to national security. Whether he was right or not is a matter for debate, but he had grounds for thinking it.
2) I don't think anyone who understands the region well, people like Tom Friedman, Bernard Lewis, really thinks you can win the war on terror without changing the culture that produces it. Ba'athist (Nationalist-Socialist) fascist authoritarianism runs hand in hand with islamic fascism. They draw from the same socio-cultural circumstances, and interestingly, the feed off of eachother symbiotically. Authoritarianism in the region uses islamic extremism as a justification for its repressiveness. Islamic extremism uses resentment of authoritarianism to grow its base of support and endear it to the people. And this leads to a situation where they also work together in several states around the region, one of them being in Iraq but also Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. We can't just go after the terrorists, round them up, and sleep peacefully. The socio-economic conditions in these societies are terrorism machines, they churn them out on a daily basis, its an ideological cauldron. If you understand how an ideology develops, and gains mass appeal, it takes years. You have the right mix of social and political attitudes and years of the right type of pedagogy in schools and youth groups...over time it creates a climate. And thats what has been going on in these societies for, oh, about the last 100 years. bin Laden just lit a match, basically.
But the region will change. History marches forward. Freedom has transformed entire civilizations that used to be built on fascism, hatred and empire and turned them into global centers of peace and prosperity. Look no further than Germany and Japan, and increasingly, Russia. Look, we already have the roadmap to winning the war on terror, its called the Arab Human Development Report, produced by Arab liberals under the auspices of the UN. It says in no uncertain terms that the declining human capital of the region is causing the miserywhich leads to terror. Opening up societies, liberalizing, creating transparency, accountability, democracy, freedom of expression, and tolerance is the ONLY way to end the cycle. This is not the Bush administration....this is the United Nations and Arab intellectuals. Iraq is already ranked the #3 most free nation in the region according to the same professionals who wrote the report, behind Tunisia and Lebanon. That is simply staggering.
In 8 months, something truly historic will happen. Iraq will be the first state in the modern middle east where people will go to the polls and choose there leaders, among a wide variety of different parties, under the auspices of a written constitution. The shockwaves this will send throughout the arab world are unimaginable. These are people who have been told their whole lives that this type of thing isn't possible, because of state security, or stability, or whatever. But if IRAQ could do it...if IRAQ could hold pluralistic elections despite all of its problems...and actually viewed the ACT of holding the elections as a MEANS to progress on stability... Well, that is a history changing event. They come along rarely. It's a 1989 calibur event. And it might not occur over night, but it changes the order of things, the culture and political dynamics throughout the region in an extroadinary way.
Whether you are for or against the war...We should ALL be on board for this. There's never been an expansion of freedom that hasn't been worth doing. These are the events that change the world. When freedom and democracy can unleash the immense potential of Arab human beings, be it economically, intellectually, scientifically, and morally...you will see an explosion of reform in that region that has been pent up for hundreds of years. It starts in Iraq. If Iraq succeeds, we won't need to put up with "allied" regimes in Saudi and Egypt anymore. History moves in tides, we need to work towards establishing a critical mass of democratic momentum.
The war on terror is a battle of ideas, not a law enforcement campaign. If we understand that, we'll win in the long term.
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