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MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS
FROM: DANIEL McKIVERGAN, Deputy Director
SUBJECT: Senator Bayh on Iraq
I want to draw your attention to the following piece, “An Intelligent Democrat,” by Stephen Hayes in the current Weekly Standard and available at www.weeklystandard.com. In the piece, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, who sits on the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committees, offers his views on dealing with “threats before they’re imminent” and the relationship between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda. Senator Bayh’s remarks strike quite a contrast with many of the leading Democratic presidential candidates.
“There were multiple reasons to remove Saddam, not the least of which was his butchering of his own people—that’s the kind of thing that most progressives cared about. We were going to have to deal with him militarily at some point in the future. The possibility—even if people thought it unlikely--that he would use weapons of mass death or provide them to terrorists was just too great a risk.”
“Even if there’s only a 10 percent chance that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden would cooperate, the question is whether that’s an acceptable level of risk. My answer to that would be an unequivocal ‘no.’ We need to be much more pro-active on eliminating threats before they’re imminent.”
“The [Iraq-al Qaeda] relationship seemed to have its roots in mutual exploitation. Saddam Hussein used terrorists for his own ends, and Osama bin Laden used a nation-state for the things that only a nation-state can provide. Some of the intelligence is strong, and some of it is murky. But that’s the nature of intelligence on a relationship like this—lots of it is going to speculation and conjecture. Following 9/11, we await certainty at our peril.”
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