The Boston Globe

September 25, 2001, Tuesday

WAS BIN LADEN WORKING WITH IRAQ?

LAURIE MYLROIE Laurie Mylroie, who was an adviser on Iraq to the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign, is author of "Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein's unfinished war against America."

BY LAURIE MYLROIE

AS THE UNITED STATES PREPARES TO FIGHT OSAMA BIN LADEN, THE ENEMY IN THIS NEW WAR AGAINST TERRORISM IS DISTURBINGLY ILL-DEFINED. ABOVE ALL, A CRITICAL QUESTION HAS NOT BEEN ADDRESSED: WAS BIN LADEN ALONE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CARNAGE THAT CCURRED ON SEPT. 11, OR WAS HE WORKING WITH AN ENEMY STATE, NAMELY IRAQ?

As Rafael Eitan, former head of Israel's Mossad, stated, "I have no doubt whatsoever that the mastermind of this atrocity is none other than the Iraqi dictator." Former CIA director Jim Woolsey has also fingered Iraq, and senior officials in the Pentagon agree.

Yet the Bush administration has adopted the position that it is not necessary to address that issue now. It will take care of bin Laden in the first phase of this war and deal with the possibility of state involvement later.

That could be quite dangerous, however. This month's terrible assault should have made clear that the United States faces a resourceful and ingenious foe. We have to be equally clever. And we do not know if those behind the earlier terrorism intend more.

Authorities are jittery. Most ominously, one airplane hijacker and a number of unidentified Middle Eastern men visited airfields over the past months asking questions about crop dusters. The planes could be used to disseminate biological agents and produce casualties on a far greater scale than the horrific attacks we have already seen.

If Iraq was involved in this month's terrorist assaults, might Saddam actually want the United States to fight bin Laden? Once the battle in Afghanistan commences, and if another terrible terrorist assault occurs, won't we interpret it in that context? Aren't we then likely to redouble our campaign against bin Laden and forget ever more about Saddam? Won't he then have license to kill even more Americans, because each time an

attack occurs, we blame it on bin Laden and his ilk?

Indeed, the war we are about to fight contradicts the principles under which the United States fought the Gulf War a decade ago. Then, there was great emphasis on being clear in our objectives and in the means to achieve them. Presently, it is the opposite: Let's get bin Laden, and then we'll worry about what comes next."

Military commanders have to make decisions on the basis of imperfect knowledge. To wait for certainty about a situation may be to invite defeat. That is also relevant to responding to the recent terrorism. A widespread misunderstanding exists about the FBI investigation and the evidence it will produce at this early stage of the inquiry.

Investigations into major terrorist attacks are invariably long, tedious affairs. It took two years to determine that Libya was behind the 1988 bombing of Pam Am 103.

If Iraq was involved in the recent assaults, the FBI is not likely to have evidence for a long time.

Should we then do nothing?

A decade ago, we would have recognized that a state was behind the latest assaults, even if that state might work with a "group" to provide deniability. The dominant understanding then was that only states had the capability to carry out major terrorist attacks. Following any such attack, the experts would speculate about which terrorist state was most likely to have been responsible. That speculation was based on an

understanding of current politics, not on the FBI investigation, which does not produce results quickly enough to inform the conduct of national security affairs.

Yet this view was lost during the Clinton years. Bill Clinton treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem, with the emphasis on arresting perpetrators and bringing them to justice. The role of states was virtually ignored.

If we could recover our understanding of a decade ago, we would recognize that only a state had the ability to organize, plan, and provide the intelligence and logistics to carry out the most devastating terrorist assault in history. Then we would ask which state might have done it, and only one would come to mind: Iraq.

The United States is still at war with Iraq. We bomb Iraq on a regular basis and maintain an economic siege that is itself the product of a war. Saddam attacks us through terrorism, thinly veiling Iraq's role by working with others. The Clinton administration, however, did not want to recognize that, and this month's events were the tragic consequence.