Bush's Own Terrorist

I paid pretty close attention to the just-concluded visit to Washington by Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari. It had its comic moments, especially when President Bush called him an "open fella," thus making an unintended pun in Arabic, since fellah is Arabic for peasant. And both Bush and Jaafari stuck closely to the sunnily optimistic cant that has marked official U.S. and Iraqi prognoses lately.

But sadly, the media gave Jaafari a free pass, asking him mostly softball questions and ignoring his radical-Islamist past, including his terrorist connections.

One thing that struck me is that nothing at all came up about Jaafari's background as a leader of the Islamic Call (Al Dawa) party. Al Dawa would qualify, in anybody's book, as a radical Islamist outfit. In Iraq, the Shiite fundamentalists are divided into rival camps: the "suits" and the "turbans." The turbans, mostly clergy, are collected in the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), whose leader, Abdel Aziz al-Hakim, was commander of its military, paramilitary arm, the Badr Brigade, and which was founded by Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in 1982. The suits, mostly laymen but still hard-core Islamists, are represented by Al Dawa. Dawa, too, received support from Khomeini's Iran in the 1980s, and like SCIRI it still has Iranian backing today.

Throughout its history, Al Dawa was a terrorist group. It was founded in the late 1950s by Iraqi mullahs opposed to socialism and nationalism, and ever since it has waged war against Iraqi governments, even before Saddam Hussein took power in 1968. In 1969, when the Shah of Iran's SAVAK and Israel's Mossad supported a Kurdish revolt in Iraq (which had CIA support, too), Dawa also got some support from SAVAK. In the 1970s and 80s, Dawa conducted an underground campaign of terrorism, killing Iraqi officials, police officers, and others. In 1983, Dawa terrorists even attacked the U.S. embassy in Kuwait, demanding freedom for some other Dawa terrorists imprisoned by the Kuwaiti government. But no one asked Jaafari, who was living in Iran in the early 1980s, about how close he was to the Dawa organization that carried out the murderous attack on an American embassy.

Critics are right to raise questions about Bush's commitment to the ideals of his democratic reform push in the Middle East, when he criticizes Syria but lavishes aid to repressive Central Asian republics. But it's also proper to question his commitment to a war on terrorism in which some terrorists, such as Al Qaeda, are called evil but others, including some currently part of the Iraqi government, get White House visits. It's the same double standard that makes the White House reluctant to pursue terrorists who conducted anti-Castro bombings and assassinations. But letting off the gangsters from SCIRI and Dawa is a dangerous game, since, now in power, there are growing reports that Iraqi government paramilitaries are carrying out revenge attacks and assassinating Sunni opposition leaders.