Thomas Wictor

I supported what we in the US call Operation Iraqi Freedom (March 20, 2024 to December 18, 2023). The main reason I supported it was that Saddam Hussein was a state sponsor of international terrorism. Other nations sponsor terrorism, but Saddam was the only leader willing to use weapons of mass destruction on a large scale. If he’d remained in power, the UN sanctions would’ve eventually been lifted—the way they’re about to be lifted on Iran—and then he would’ve continued his quest for nuclear weapons. Israelis would be in a lot more danger today, due to Saddam’s relationship with the Palestinians.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin said “The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” Democracies are too greedy and muddleheaded to follow Thomas Jefferson’s maxim: “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.” It was recently revealed that three Israelis were arrested for smuggling weapons-making materials into Gaza for Hamas. These men can be killed by the same rockets and mortar rounds that are fatal to all other Israelis, but the love of money trumped their survival instinct.

The same thing was happening with Iraq. Western corporations were pressuring the UN to lift the sanctions, and Saddam had already bought off the people tasked with safeguarding our lives.

“The biggest financial scandal ever.” That is what one American senator called the shenanigans over the UN‘s oil-for-food programme. Designed to soften the impact of UN sanctions on the Iraqi people by allowing the supervised sale of some Iraqi oil, it ended up enabling Saddam Hussein to haul in lots of money and enriching many other shady types. The affair threatened to discredit the whole United Nations system and almost brought down Kofi Annan, its then boss. Even now, the scandal is quietly claiming victims, though in a lot of places it seems to have vanished mysteriously from the radar.

Just about everyone has a price. The only way to ensure that Saddam would no longer be a danger was to remove him from power.

Saddam’s sponsorship of terrorism isn’t a secret. What happened was that the political enemies of George W. Bush and Tony Blair—in cahoots with the press—rewrote history. The first major politician to accuse Bush of lying was Senator Ted Kennedy.

Bush idolized Kennedy, so he refused to fight back. Kennedy admitted that his accusations of lying were politically motivated.

Shortly after the Iraq war started I saw Senator Kennedy in a public session of the U.S. Supreme Court. As we were taking our seats he briefly took my arm and told me he greatly appreciated the attitude of the Spanish government regarding the decision taken by the White House [to go to war] because, he said, “although you know my position “—he was one of the few senators to oppose the authorization for the war—”I appreciate the solidarity with my country in times like this.” “I would appreciate if you relay this to President Aznar,” he added.

—Javier Rupérez
Spanish ambassador to the US
2000 to 2004

If Bush lied us into war, why would Kennedy appreciate Spain’s solidarity? Wouldn’t that be an utter travesty and obscenity?

Kennedy knew Bush didn’t lie. That’s because Kennedy had access to intelligence proving that Saddam Hussein was a sponsor of jihadist terrorism and had a direct and personal relationship with al-Qaeda.

Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, by the Institute for Defense Analyses’ Joint Advanced Warfighting Program has all the information you need. The PDF takes forever to load, but here are some highlights. “IIS” is the Iraqi Intelligence Service, the Jihaz Al-Mukhabarat Al-Amma.

Here are IIS memorandums on Palestinian terrorist organizations.

Did you know that Palestinian commandos fought Americans in Desert Storm?

A Palestinian jihadist organization that saw Saddam Hussein as the leader of the war against the infidels. News to you?

Look which people provided the largest number of men trained as terrorists to fight the Americans.

Now we move on to Saddam and a man named Abu al-Abbas.

Look at all those military operations Palestinians carried out in the name of Saddam Hussein. He had the money, the know-how, and the means to make even the smallest group of terrorists into a professional force.

Finally, Saddam Hussein and Hamas.

You knew that Iran and Qatar were Hamas’s patrons, but did you know that Iraq was too?

This is why I never had any second thoughts about Operation Iraqi Freedom. The US and Britain wasted eighteen months trying to get the UN on board. What do you suppose Saddam Hussein was doing during this time with his weapons of mass destruction (WMD)? The Deputy Commander of US Central Command (CENTCOM) was Lieutenant-General Michael P. “Rifle” DeLong. He’s spoken for years about what Saddam did with his WMD.

Tonight someone on Twitter told me that Hamas didn’t murder Ismail, Mohammed, Ahed, and Zakaria Bakr of the Gaza beach. She said that I’d just made up a “crazy conspiracy theory.”

You know what the craziest conspiracy theory of all time is? That the entire world’s press colluded to present George W. Bush as a liar and to deny Saddam Hussein’s connection to Islamic terrorism.

But that’s a conspiracy theory that’s 100 percent true.