In general, I thought and still think that the claim that we went to war in Iraq as Bush Jr’s retaliation for the assassination attempt against his father was bogus, silly, and unserious; it acts as a kind of deflection from the hard questions about the costs of leaving Saddam Hussein in power. (There are parallel rhetorical tropes on the other side, of course– cf “objectively pro-Saddam” as applied to people who aren’t George Galloway or Ramsey Clark.)
But the administration’s response to Richard Clarke today seems be bringing that assassination attempt up rather a lot. The claim is: it was reasonable to suspect Iraq of involvement in 9/11, because Iraq had tried to kill GHWB, eight years before. Quoth Condoleeza Rice: “Iraq, given our history, given the fact they tried to kill a former president, was a likely suspect.” Clarke’s book apparently quotes a number of people, including Paul Wolfowitz, talking about “Iraqi terrorism,” referring to the assassination attempt.
In the first place, it’s not clear to me that an assassination attempt against a former President counts as “terrorism” strictly defined. Bush Sr. was by that time a civilian and not in any way a combatant, making the assassination attempt a war crime even if Iraq and the U.S. had still been at war. Of course, they weren’t, because Saddam Hussein had accepted the terms of a UN cease-fire which he then proceeded to violate for a dozen years; the assassination attempt might well have counted as an additional violation of the cease-fire in addition to being a war crime.
But I understand terrorism to refer to acts of violence (often but not necessarily mass violence) against civilians more or less randomly selected, violence that aims to terrorize the rest of a society’s population into submission. I can’t think that I’ve ever before heard the attempt to kill one prominent person in particular, singled out for clear and straightforward (even if wrongful) reasons, “terrorism.”
But putting that semantic point aside; an eight-year-old assassination attempt against the ex-President who had led a coalition to war against one’s country just doesn’t seem like relevantly the same kind of act as 9/11. Was Iraq functionally an enemy state, with motive to strike against the United States? Sure. But did it have any kind of pattern of behavior into which 9/11 would fit? No; the attempt to kill George H.W. Bush isn’t much at all the same kind of thing. Al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, the ETA, the Real IRA, various PLO factions, some Algerian groups, even the Tamil Tigers– sure. Iran as the sponsor of Hezbollah, Libya as the perpetrator of the Lockerbie and Berlin bombings? Yes. Not all of them had patterns of such behavior against the U.S., but this was the sort of thing they were known to do.
I don’t even deny that Saddam Hussein would have been happy to commit mass terrorism against the U.S. — that he had motive. But it doesn’t seem to me that the assassination attempt added anything to the estimate of the likelihood of his complicity. Either his motive alone was sufficient reason to suspect him, or it wasn’t. Classifying an assassination attempt as “terrorism” doesn’t make it the kind of activity that establishes a pattern of behavior into which 9/11 would also fit.
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