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Saddam Warned Baathists Against

Juan Cole 01/15/2004

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Saddam Warned Baathists against Cooperating with Radical Islamists

The New York Times revealed on Wednesday via a leaked document found with Saddam Hussein that the Iraqi dictator forbade his followers in recent months from cooperating with foreign radical Islamist fighters who had infiltrated the country. Saddam appears to have seen the resistance as a way for the Baath to return to power, and feared that the jihadis had different ideas.

Well, folks, if Saddam wouldn’t cooperate with the al-Qaeda and other radical Islamists when he was reduced to hiding in a spider hole, he sure as hell wasn’t going to give them WMD when he was in his palace in Baghdad!

The thing that makes me weep is that some GIs actually went to war against Iraq with pictures of the Twin Towers in their backpacks, thinking they were avenging September 11. If they wanted to avenge September 11 they should have gone to Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, ash-Sharq al-Awsat reported that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said it was a little unlikely that the US would try Saddam itself, but he would not rule it out. Since the US has declared Saddam a POW, it has the prerogative of trying him in a military court.

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About the Author

Juan Cole is the founder and chief editor of Informed Comment. He is Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan He is author of, among many other books, Muhammad: Prophet of Peace amid the Clash of Empires and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Follow him on Twitter at @jricole or the Informed Comment Facebook Page

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