Former American Enterprise Institute Iraq hand Laurie Mylroie wrote a book alleging that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was really behind the 1993 Al Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center. In the wake of 9/11, Mylroie’s book and theories were highly influential on the thinking especially of then deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz and former CIA director James Woolsey, who wrote a blurb for her book. Indeed, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Woolsey was reportedly dispatched to the UK to pursue one of Mylroie’s theories.
Now, the Weekly Standard‘s Stephen Hayes, the authorized biographer of Vice President Dick Cheney and like both the Veep and Mylroie, a proponent of the theory that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda worked closely together, tries to throw Mylroie overboard:
Mylroie comes up In several of the books written about the Iraq War as a terrorism analyst who led the Bush Administration into making questionable claims about Iraq and al Qaeda. (George Packer, the New Yorker writer and author of the otherwise well-reported book, “The Assassin’s Gate,” makes this mistake.) This vastly overstates her role. Although her emails may have occasionally made their way to Bush administration officials, no one I know took her arguments very seriously. For good reason. Mylroie has seen an Iraqi hand behind virtually every terrorist attack on American interests. Indeed, in our one brief conversation, she faulted me for failing to understand that al Qaeda is little more than an Iraqi “front group.” That’s crazy. Iraq was an active state sponsor of terror and, as the recent Pentagon report confirms, a willing sponsor of al Qaeda leaders, their terrorist associates, and a wide variety of jihadist groups.
Hey, at least the hawks are still loyal to Chalabi.
