MISSING LINKS? Here’s a roundup on the weekend’s Iraq/Al Qaeda opining.

The Weekly Standard piece, based on a memo from Douglas Feith, laying out the case that Saddam cuddled Osama like a five-year-old girl with a kitten (stuff in italics is from the Feith memo): “Reporting entries #4, #11, #15, #16, #17, and #18, from different sources, corroborate each other and provide confirmation of meetings between al Qaeda operatives and Iraqi intelligence in Afghanistan and Pakistan. None of the reports have information on operational details or the purpose of such meetings. The covert nature of the relationship would indicate strict compartmentation [sic] of operations.

“Information about connections between al Qaeda and Iraq was so widespread by early 1999 that it made its way into the mainstream press. A January 11, 1999, Newsweek story ran under this headline: ‘Saddam + Bin Laden?’ The story cited an ‘Arab intelligence source’ with knowledge of contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda. ‘According to this source, Saddam expected last month’s American and British bombing campaign to go on much longer than it did. The dictator believed that as the attacks continued, indignation would grow in the Muslim world, making his terrorism offensive both harder to trace and more effective. With acts of terror contributing to chaos in the region, Turkey, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait might feel less inclined to support Washington. Saddam’s long-term strategy, according to several sources, is to bully or cajole Muslim countries into breaking the embargo against Iraq, without waiting for the United Nations to lift if formally.’ [Eve adds: This bit is important because many people asked why a secular Ba’athist freakshow would ally himself with an Islamist freakshow–what was in it for Saddam?]

“Intelligence reports about the nature of the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda from mid-1999 through 2003 are conflicting….”

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Rebuttal from the Washington Monthly, calling the Iraq/Al Q claim “The Weakest Link“: “When it comes to international terrorism directed at the United States, however, there is mounting evidence of Saudi complicity, but virtually none on Saddam.

“… Far from being ‘harbored’ by Saddam, Ansar al Islam operated out of northeastern Iraq, an area under Kurdish control that was being protected from Saddam’s incursions by U.S. warplanes. Indeed, some of its members fought against Saddam during the Iran-Iraq war. …

“…The contacts were not, as Tenet’s language suggested, ongoing for the past 10 years. Most had occurred during the mid-1990s, in the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. At that time, Sudan’s Islamism had sent so many spies and terrorists flooding into Khartoum that the city resembled a jihadist version of the bar scene from Star Wars. There, some of the world’s most infamous terrorists, such as Hezbollah mastermind Imad Mugniyah, frequently crossed paths with foreign intelligence agents, including, Tenet claimed, Iraq’s. But even if Iraqi agents had had contact with al Qaeda operatives, notes one former intelligence official, ‘that’s what all intelligence officers do. They try to get in touch with the bad guys, the enemies, and co-opt them in some way, with money or something else’–which is quite different from forging a working relationship. …

“…First, as far as we know, there were no significant contacts between Iraq and al Qaeda after 1998. Second, these Iraqi overtures do not appear to have been reciprocated.”

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Reactions from Matthew Yglesias : “Second, much of the alleged link seems to pertain to al-Qaeda way back in its Sudan days when it was a pretty different organization. Links from then are much less significant than links from the era between the ’98 embassy bombing and 9-11, and way less significant than evidence of post-9/11 links. …Note that the information becomes much sketchier after 1998. In particular, there are several uses of the tactic employed by Powell at the UN where one extremely slender thread (i.e., a guy who ‘claimed’ to have gotten a job in Malaysia ‘through the Iraqi embassy’ was at a meeting) is used as an excuse to provide an extended discourse on the bad acts of some al-Qaeda members. I have no doubt that the folks involved in that Malaysia meeting were bad people, but the question was the link to Iraq. The only evidence of such a link is the say-so of one man that he got the job through the embassy, and even if he did get the job through the embassy that hardly proves he was given it in order to collaborate with al-Qaeda….” more

Oxblog:

Parsing the DOD memo: I don’t speak bureaucratese, but I have to say it sounds like Josh (who is undecided on the memo’s salience) is stretching–hard not to read the memo as a disavowal of the WS‘s interpretation. (Which doesn’t mean the WS is wrong!)

David Adesnik asks the political questions; Josh replies.

David’s most compelling question, to me, is this one: “Why has the information turned up now? Why would the White House sit on information that would vindicate its decision to invade Iraq? The Standard article says the information was compiled in response to a request by the Senate Intelligence Committee. Why the heck would the administration wait until the Senate showed an interest before doing some serious research on the Saddam-Osama connection?”

Mark Shea: “So while it will be a very fine thing if, in fact, a support of Al-Quaeda is out of the way. But it will be a very bad thing if, in tradeoff for that, we transform ourselves into a nation which says the ends justify the means. The question that still needs to be attended to is the justice of the war as it was when we launched in it in March when Bush said there was no connection between Saddam and Al-Qaeda.”

You can use this handy search results page at GlobalSecurity.org to find multiple statements by George Tenet on this question. Link via one of Yglesias’s commenters.

Me? Still confused. Sorry….