Juan Cole has published a thought provoking item, Did al-Qaeda Game Bush into Iraq War?. Long excerpt:
Douglas Jehl of the New York Times explains how Ibn al-Shaykh Libi, a high al-Qaeda official of Libyan extraction, was captured in fall of 2001 and alleged to CIA interrogators that Iraq had provided al-Qaeda with training in chemical and biological weapons.Not sure I am convinced by Cole's anaylsis, but it does put another angle on the motivations for war.Later on, Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Shaykh Muhammad were captured in Pakistan. Abu Zubaydah was wounded in the course of being captured and was put on heavy duty pain killers, and was interrogated in part while under their influence. Both he and KSM maintained that Bin Laden had forbidden any operational cooperation with Iraq, because it was ruled by an infidel secular Arab socialist regime.
When the CIA came back to Libi with these statements of his colleagues, he folded and admitted he had lied.
What is going on here? It has been suggested that Libi told the CIA whatever they wanted to hear because they tortured him. But there is another possibility, which is that he deliberately misled them. Libi is also the source of a report in January 2002 that al-Qaeda had targeted the US naval base in Bahrain. That allegation was never confirmed, and it is possible that it was also a lie, intended to draw US resources away from Afghanistan, or to make the US cautious about using the base.
I think Bin Laden and his lieutenants wanted to provoke wars between the US and Muslim states. I think they knew that the 9/11 attacks would guarantee a US war on Afghanistan, and that they were confident they could draw the US into the country and defeat it, as they had the Soviets.
hat they were trying to provoke a US/Afghanistan war and knew their actions would provoke one is suggested in several ways. First, they made no effort to have the hijackers on 9/11 employ aliases or cover their tracks. A toddler could have traced Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdar back to al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan. They made their reservations under their own names! All of the hijackers had. Counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke was astounded that these men had even been let on the planes under those names, many of which were well known to US intelligence. Likewise, Bin Laden hand-picked the Saudi "muscle" that he sent along at the last minute, from among young men personally loyal to him, and who would be known to be his men. September 11 was a way of waving a huge red flag from Afghanistan at the American bull.
NYRB on Darfur
John Ryle has an article online in the coming New York Review of Books,
Disaster in Darfur. This is one of the best analyses into the political motivations behind what the US is doing diplomatically about the disaster: not that I've found much worth reading on the topic.