But Stephen Hayes, contributor to The Weekly Standard and author of the book The Connection, begs to differ. With what evidence? Why, the report itself. As Scott Johnson writes, "If you have only learned of the report via reportage such as (ABC News and The New York Times), take a look at the report with your own eyes before drawing any conclusions about it." Verily. Here is the report; here is Hayes's post about it.
I'm not going to go into detail about the contradictions themselves, since Johnson and Hayes have done such a fine job of it already. But it seems that the main distinction that has not been made here by the news agencies is the difference between "ties" and "operational ties." Just because Iraqi and al Qaeda agents never conducted joint operations hardly means there are no ties between them. In fact, the report gives powerful evidence of cooperation between the two organizations. And, as Hayes points out, their short-term goals are extremely similar, so why not?
Beyond which, Saddam Hussein's ostentatious support of terrorism, whether cooperatively with al Qaeda or not, justified invasion under the Bush Doctrine, in principle if not in practice (which is a different debate altogether.) The idea that Hussein had nothing to do with Islamic terrorism is one simply dreamed up by anti-war (but mostly anti-Bush) folks after the fact. Atheistic Westerners loathe religious people, so I suppose it's easy for them to imagine that a secular nationalist government like Hussein's has the same loathing for jihadis. They may be forgetting that, whereas Westerners have the luxury to despise religious folks from the comfort of their studies in their enormous houses around San Francisco, California, Hussein and other such leaders kept power by encouraging and harnessing anti-Western emotions, just like al Qaeda, and shared with al Qaeda a violent hostility toward the West. The notion that cooperation between the two is philosophically impossible is absurd. Divergent philosophies never got in the way of marriages of convenience before (think Molotov-Ribbentrop).
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