I don’t know why I took so long to read Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest piece from Kurdistan in the New Yorker. I started reading it coming back on the plane from Miami and I’m still reeling. It’s easily the most important piece of journalism produced this year: judiciously reported, pellucidly written, morally strict. It starts with Goldberg’s journey into the fledgling region of Kurdistan, the autonomous semi-state constructed by the Kurds betrayed and rejected by every major power for centuries. He reports on the horrors of what Saddam did in Halabja, and what, given a chance, Saddam and his proxies would do in this country and Israel if he is not stopped. What Goldberg shows is that Saddam’s chemical attacks on his own citizens were not merely exercises in genocidal evil. They were target practice:
“An Iraqi defector, Khidhir Hamza, who is the former director of Saddam’s nuclear weapons program, told me earlier this year that before the attack on Halabja, military doctors had mapped the city, and that afterward they entered it wearing protective clothing in order to study the dispersal of the dead. ‘These were field tests, an experiment on a town,’ Hamza told me. He said that he had direct knowledge of the Army’s procedures that day in Halabja. ‘The doctors were given sheets with grids on them, and they had to answer questions such as ‘How far are the dead from the canisters?””
Even those who survived are hideously deformed, infertile, or sick. The children of the region die slow and awful deaths from lung cancer. No one can say we haven’t been warned.
THE AL QAEDA LINK: The first sign of real hope for those on the frontline of this maniac’s ambitions was president Bush’s state of the union speech, confirming its status in my mind as the Iron Curtain moment of the 21st Century. Bush’s address, according to Goldberg,
“had had an electric effect on every Kurd I met who heard [it] … General Simko Dizayee, the chief of staff of the peshmerga, told me, ‘Bush’s speech filled our hearts with hope.'”
But Goldberg’s key contribution is to show, convincingly to my mind, how logical and likely it is that Saddam is now in league with al Qaeda and other terrorist groups to bring these awful weapons of mass destruction to the cities and towns where you and I live. The key linkage, Goldberg suggests, is a small fanatical Islamo-fascist terrorist group called Ansar al-Islam, operating in the hinterlands of Kurdistan. Goldberg writes:
“The allegations include charges that Ansar al-Islam has received funds directly from al Qaeda; that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with al Qaeda operatives, over Ansar al-Islam; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of al Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of al Qaeda members fleeing Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by Ansar al-Islam; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan. If these charges are true, it would mean that the relationship between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.”
It also seems to me to mean something quite simple. Even if it is merely possible that these allegations are true, the consequences are obvious. This war has just begun. Afghanistan was a preliminary. Iraq is the issue. We must act – and quickly, and decisively and with no possibility for error. I trust this president to get that balance right, and was relieved to hear his renewed commitment yesterday. The phony war is nearing its end. The real and vital conflict will soon be here. And the sooner it comes, the less likelihood of the unthinkable occurring.
(For an online Q and A with Goldberg about his article, click here.)
NIXON AND NOW: Perusing former president Nixon’s deranged and taped harangues against Jews, gays and weed today, reminds me again of what a disgraceful president he was – catastrophic in domestic policy, mediocre abroad. But it says something, doesn’t it, that a website like this that routinely defends Jews, gays and weed would now be regarded by many as conservative. Progress, no?
The Dish 