February 14, 2003

I'm sure I won't be

I'm sure I won't be the first or only one to link to this arresting WSJ editorial illustrating the consonance of aims and methods between Saddam and Osama. Examples are furnished from the state-controlled (obviously) Iraqi press, complete with scans of magazine covers, and many are quite striking:

eerily, a July 21, 2001, commentary in the Iraqi publication Al-Nasiriya praised bin Laden: "In this man's heart you'll find an insistence, a strange determination that he will reach one day the tunnels of the White House and will bomb it with everything that is in it."

The article recounts bin Laden's attacks on U.S. targets and U.S. efforts "to pressure the Taliban movement so that it would hand them bin Laden, while he continues to smile and still thinks seriously, with the seriousness of the Bedouin of the desert about the way he will try to bomb the Pentagon after he destroys the White House."

The commentary is ominously prescient, especially since it could never have appeared without official sanction. "Bin Laden is a healthy phenomenon in the Arab spirit," it continues, speaking about his goal to "drive off the Marines" from Arabia. Most eerily of all, the writer adds that those Marines "will be going away because the revolutionary bin Laden is insisting very convincingly that he will strike America on the arm that is already hurting. That the manÊ.Ê.Ê. will curse the memory of Frank Sinatra every time he hears his songs." Is that a reference to Sinatra's "New York, New York"? Did Saddam know what would happen two months later?


There's much, much more along these lines. Were you skeptical about the received wisdom that the anthrax mailings were perpetrated by a lone domestic nut? So was Saddam. Read the details and shudder.

Posted by Dr. Frank at February 14, 2003 07:50 AM | TrackBack