We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

The enemy of my enemy

Another ‘truth’ constantly parroted at us is bin Laden would never work with Saddam. As with the bin Laden was trained by the CIA meme, it can be difficult to remember or find the refuting evidence when you need it. Fortunately, someone has done it for us.

It is a good summary, but Richard Miniter (author of Losing bin Laden) left out at least one item.

8 comments to The enemy of my enemy

  • Rob

    The “Bin Laden and Saddam wouldn’t work together – they were ideologically poles apart” argument is deeply silly.
    Churchill and Stalin were ideologically poles apart but they worked together when it suited them against a common enemy.
    Other examples are, I feel sure, too numerous to mention.

  • Johan

    This is some really good stuff. Heck, I’m gonna print it out to my socialist/communist History teacher and laugh at him.

  • Scott Cattanach

    The “Bin Laden and Saddam wouldn’t work together – they were ideologically poles apart” argument is deeply silly. Churchill and Stalin were ideologically poles apart but they worked together when it suited them against a common enemy. Other examples are, I feel sure, too numerous to mention.

    Thus making Chruchill and Stalin moral equivalents and interchangable enemies, just like Saddam and Osama, right? Why didn’t the US recognize the UK as our Cold War enemy, given the many meetings between our main enemy, the USSR, and various UK govt representatives?

  • The previous comment shows a remarkable lack of chronological coherence…

    The “main enemy” at the time of those meeting was Hitler. Churchill *and* the US met with Stalin, and the US provided vast amounts of aid to Stalin on the principle of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

    After the war, the USSR became the main enemy. It was Churchill who first appreciated this (he knew this would occur while he was cooperating with Stalin). Roosevelt, with communist agents among his advisers, was much more comfortable with Stalin (hence giving away eastern Europe at Yalta).

    Furthermore, alliances do not create moral equivalences in the first place. It has often been necessary for the democratic countries to ally with unsavory governments.

    But when Al Quaeda and Saddam ally, they certainly support the hypothesis that they are both our enemies, and that the cooperation flows both ways… that both are gaining from the relationship. Thus to suppose that this cooperation existed without Al Quaeda gaining support from Saddam is naive. Furthermore, some of the evidence cited goes far beyond “meetings” – such as training Al Quaeda members to take over aircraft using knives!

  • Scott Cattanach

    But when Al Quaeda and Saddam ally, they certainly support the hypothesis that they are both our enemies, and that the cooperation flows both ways… that both are gaining from the relationship. Thus to suppose that this cooperation existed without Al Quaeda gaining support from Saddam is naive. Furthermore, some of the evidence cited goes far beyond “meetings” – such as training Al Quaeda members to take over aircraft using knives!

    Nothing here proved any sort of alliance, and we’ll see just how much of this holds up to further investigation.

    Have y’all considered the possibility that when we insisted on becoming their common enemy, their ‘cooperation’ became a self-fulfiling prophesy?

    September 21, 2003 An Historical What-If
    Radley Balko

    So anti-war libertarians generally believe that it was our involvement in Gulf War I that pissed Osama bin Laden off enough to make us the object of his ire (we had been quasi-allies with him, after all, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan). It was American troops in the Muslim holy land that made us the focus of his anger.

    Most libertarains opposed Gulf War I, under the theory that it wasn’t in our national security interest. The typical consevative, pro-war response to this is that beyond Kuwait, Saddam had his eye on Saudi Arabia. And if we hadn’t intervened, he may have invaded his way to a significant share of the world oil market.

    The libertarian response to this is “so what?” Merely controlling a significant share of the world’s oil supply means nothing. Sitting on oil bestows no power whatsoever. It isn’t until you sell the oil that you begin to accumulate the spoils of owning it. And so Saddam would still have no choice but to sell oil to the United States for the simple fact that we are the world’s biggest consumer of oil — there’s no benefit in refusing to sell to us.

    But I think you can take this a step further.

    Not only would Saddam’s invasion (and, for the sake of argument, let’s say conquer) of Saudi Arabia have not presented a crisis for the United States, it may have presented an opportunity. Several, actually.

    Up until 1990 or so, Saddam Hussein was, for all intents and purposes, an ally. See the deliciously chummy 1980s footage of Donald Rumsfeld and Saddam Hussein as evidence (one was presenting an award to the other, I can’t remember which was which). We backed Saddam in the Iran-Iraq war, and if memory serves, gave him all sorts of foreign aid throughout the 1980s.

    Had we sat back and let him have his way with Saudi Arabia, think of what might have happened:

    1) A quasi-ally gains control of a major share of the world oil market. We no longer have to deal with the Saudis, whose allegiances are suspect, and who fund terrorists with the left hand just as they’re bribing U.S. politicians with the right.

    2) Suddenly, it is Iraqi, not U.S. troops that are soiling the Muslim holy land. Osama and Saddam were never friendly. Osama sought Muslim theocracies. Saddam’s regime was a secular dictatorship. Their only reason for alliance (and I’m still of the opinion that there wasn’t one) was their mutual dislike for the United States. Had we never entered Saudi Arabia in Gulf War I, we may have been able to sit back and watch two shady characters duke it out — and kept our hands clean of the entire mess.

    3) If Saddam had toppled the Hous of Saud, we wouldn’t be dealing with the ticking bomb of influnece, influx of wealth into vital U.S. interests (the stock market, for example), oil, terrorism, corruption, and the inevitabe collapse that defines our current relationship with the Saudis. Remember, the Saudi/al-Qaeda conection is much more quantifiable than the Iraqi/al-Qaeda connection….

  • Gulf War I was probably the cause of Bin Laden’s personal animus against the US and the House of Saud, although I suspect he would have found another reason without it. The Egyptian side of Al Quaeda (which is where the brains lie) was in action long before that.

    That Gulf War I did not need to be fought involves a rather unlikely scenario. What you left out is Saddam, with all that oil, and with nuclear weapons and ICBM’s, becoming an extremely serious threat to the world’s population.

    Saddam was a malignant narcissist in the same class as Stalin or Hitler. He would have kept conquering and killing until he died.

    Certainly the US would have been in the position of one of the least threatened, because of our distance from the area and our nuclear capability. However, with Saddam controlling all that territory, he would have been able to control the price of oil, and would have used that both to increase it to a level very damaging to the economies of the rest of the world, and to exert geopolitical leverage that the Saudis can only dream of.

    Saddam Hussein was in almost every way like Hitler. He had the same level of ambition, except in his case it was the Arab race rather than the Aryan race. He would have had more devastating weapons and no reluctance to use them. Without the first Gulf War, he would have conquered Iran (and slaughtered many of its people), Saudi Arabia, Syria, Egypt, Turkey, Libya, the Sudan and a few more. He would have destroyed Israel (at the cost of losing Baghdad and a number of other cities, but the lives of his citizens have never meant anything to him – he is a psychopath, after all).

    In other words, the libertarian position was typically (for libertarian foreign policy) shortsighted. The main reason I left the US Libertarian party and became a Republican was this exact ideology-inflicted blindness to foreign events and their ultimate impact.

    Saddam, also, is merely an example. There are other similar monsters out there. Kim Il Sung is one. Mao was another (but fortunately he is dead and the resulting regime is, while still ruthless, at least more pragmatic). Osama and his ilk are of a different psychological type, but was also very dangerous (personally, I think the guy is now worm food).

    Any ideology which cannot adequately deal with the existence of powerful and ruthless psychopaths in control of significant countries will not work. This is a problem with the transzis and is a problem with many Libertarians.

  • Gosh! Reading this it seems there were almost as many undercover al Qaeda agents working in Iraq as there are in England.

  • Kohut's Dog

    “Terror is rule by people who are terrorized,” said Friedrich Engels. And as long as some children are terrorized and instilled with shame in childhood by cruel, unloving, non-mirroring parents, there will always be, as there has always been, a succession of pathological narcissists to wreak havoc on the world. They hide their inferiority complexes behind a mask of self-righteous perfection, and find scapegoats on whom to project unconscious self-loathing, persecuting their victims with a paranoid viciousness and dictatorial control–just as caregivers once treated them. With some pathological, fear-racked narcissists, including Hilter, Stalin, Rev. Jim Jones, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden, proving themselves worthy leaves a body count. Me God, you die. Sadly, deficient parents are inevitable, so the wise must recognize the characteristics of what they produce–those often charismatic, image-obsessed predators en route to nemesis.