Restating the Obvious

A secular dictator who is in the bullseye of a major power whose internal political dynamics encourage foreign adventures and the same secular dictator sitting atop large oil reserves and a restive mixed sect population will ally itself with a group of sectarian fanactics whose strategic analysis and objectives is to strike the major power in order to topple secular dictators and authoritarian monarachies who sit atop large oil reserves. That is basically the strategic dynamic that would have to underline any active collaboration between Saddam Hussein and Al-Queda. Somewhat absurd but it was one of the main points of argument to invade Iraq as President Bush and other senior administration officials who knew or should have known better.

This claim due to the previous discussed incentive structure was farcical to anyone paying attention in 2002/2003, and believable only to the idiots at the American Enterprise Institute led by Laurie Mylroie. It is still a siren song on the dead-ender right that Al Queada has a long and established history in Iraq and will take over the place as soon as either the US stops showing resolve (@ $12 billion a month, and several hundred US casualties,) elects Democrats, or withdraws heavy combat formations.

The Pentagon disagrees on this assessment on several fronts. Al-Queada and other foreign fighters had never been a large component of the Sunni-Arab insurgencies, never more than 5% to 10% of the total fighters and they were often seen as useful idiots at best, and usually idiots (which is one of the prompts for the Awakening... the idiots overstayed their welcome and tried to collect smuggling taxes), and the only Al-Queada linked group in Iraq pre-invasion was Ansar al Islam which operated in the Kurdish zone that existed under American air cover.

Today, the DOD reports that after looking at over half a million documents, several thousand hours of interviews and interogations, that a secular dictatorship sitting atop of a bunch of oil was not actively collaborating with a bunch of religious nuts who want to topple secular dictatorships....

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were confiscated after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network....

An exhaustive review of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents that were confiscated after the 2003 U.S. invasion has found no evidence that Saddam Hussein's regime had any operational links with Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network.

No shit