Osama-Saddam Connection?
Linking to two comments on the Stephen Hayes article in the Weekly Standard, which in turn cites a leaked memo by Douglas Feith--one of Rumsfeld's "politicals" in the Pentagon.
Josh Marshall: most of the alleged links between Al Qaeda and the Saddam regime have circulated before. Intelligence experts have said they are unreliable, or taken out of context. Low-level meetings may mean very little as far as an international conspiracy to attack Western countries, particularly the U.S.
On the other hand: why can't we simply get a full accounting of what is known, instead of odds and ends of leaks?
"And when you consider that we now essentially own Iraq --- the regime leaders, most all the government records that survive, and so forth --- we shouldn't need to go on hints and allegations. We should know something close to the whole story. And from what we know now, there's not much of a story."
Jesse Walker in Reason Online: He still thinks the best reason for opposing the U.S. invasion was that Saddam had little to do with Osama. The key fact was not and is not that Saddam was secular, while Osama was pious/sacred, but that "Saddam was more interested in power than ideology, and his ambitions were regional; bin Laden was a threat to those ambitions and that power."
"Hardly anyone denies that there were 'links' between Iraq and Al Qaeda, if by 'links' one means periodic communication; then again, not many people are willing to endorse a war just because Osama was in somebody's rolodex."
For Walker, the U.S. invasion is likely to be creating supporters of terrorism, and it is the invasion that has most likely forged an alliance between the Osama forces and the Saddam forces. "If investigators ever uncover a joint effort between bin Laden and Hussein to kill Americans, they will have found a compelling reason to have intervened against Iraq. They will also have found a compelling demonstration that our past intervention in the region was a failure."
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