I’m frequently amazed that conservatives, years later, still want to believe that there was some kind of important connection between Saddam Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda before the 2003 invasion. Someone even made the argument in the comments section a couple of weeks ago.
The evidence has been overwhelming for years that these ideologues are completely wrong. Indeed, we didn’t really need yet another report proving that there is “no evidence that Saddam Hussein’s regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden’s al Qaida terrorist network,” but we have one anyway. McClatchy reported on an “exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were captured after the 2003 U.S. invasion,” which tells us what we already knew.
The new study of the Iraqi regime’s archives found no documents indicating a “direct operational link” between Hussein’s Iraq and al Qaida before the invasion, according to a U.S. official familiar with the report.
He and others spoke to McClatchy on condition of anonymity because the study isn’t due to be shared with Congress and released before Wednesday.
President Bush and his aides used Saddam’s alleged relationship with al Qaida, along with Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction, as arguments for invading Iraq after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
Then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld claimed in September 2002 that the United States had “bulletproof” evidence of cooperation between the radical Islamist terror group and Saddam’s secular dictatorship.
Then-Secretary of State Colin Powell cited multiple linkages between Saddam and al Qaida in a watershed February 2003 speech to the United Nations Security Council to build international support for the invasion. Almost every one of the examples Powell cited turned out to be based on bogus or misinterpreted intelligence.
As recently as last July, Bush tried to tie al Qaida to the ongoing violence in Iraq. “The same people that attacked us on September the 11th is a crowd that is now bombing people, killing innocent men, women and children, many of whom are Muslims,” he said.
ABC News reported, “Others have reached the same conclusion, but no previous study has had access to so much information. Further, this is the first official acknowledgement from the U.S. military that there is no evidence Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda.”
This may have at least some tangential connection to the presidential campaign.
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive GOP nominee, mocked Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, recently for saying that he’d keep some U.S. troops in Iraq if al Qaida established a base there.
“I have some news. Al Qaida is in Iraq,” McCain told supporters. Obama retorted that, “There was no such thing as al Qaida in Iraq until George Bush and John McCain decided to invade.” (In fact, al Qaida in Iraq didn’t emerge until 2004, a year after the invasion.)
And John Cole had an interesting item relating these new Iraq revelations to the political topic d’jour.
[I]t is depressing to the nth order that Spitzer is going to go down for getting his rocks off with an escort, but this disaster hasn’t cost anyone so much as a cut in pay….
I am not letting Spitzer off the hook for being an abusive prosecutor and a first-class hypocrite…. Eliot Spitzer is losing his job, Bush is still in office and Don Rumsfeld is probably scheduling a book tour. To me, that is criminal.
Hard to argue with that.