That non-existent link
A couple of mainstream media outlets have now acknowledged the fact that the study by the Institute for Defense Analyses based on 600,000 documents seized from Saddam’s Iraq and which was said to have shown ‘no tie’ between Saddam and al Qaeda in fact reveal a far greater involvement by Saddam with al Qaeda affiliates and other international terrorist groups threatening western interests than was ever suspected. The Wall Street Journal observed:
The redacted version of ‘Saddam and Terrorism’ is the most definitive public assessment to date from the Harmony program, the trove of ‘exploitable’ documents, audio and video records, and computer files captured in Iraq. On the basis of about 600,000 items, the report lays out Saddam's willingness to use terrorism against American and other international targets, as well as his larger state sponsorship of terror, which included harboring, training and equipping jihadis throughout the Middle East.At the Weekly Standard Stephen Hayes, who has tirelessly revealed details of Saddam’s links to terrorism over the years, frets about the extraordinary failure not merely of the media to report these findings, instead representing the report misleadingly as claiming that there were no ‘direct’ Saddam/al Qaeda links, but also the inexplicable silence by the US government which has not mentioned them either.
What's happening here is obvious. Military historians and terrorism analysts are engaged in a good faith effort to review the captured documents from the Iraqi regime and provide a dispassionate, fact-based examination of Saddam Hussein's long support of jihadist terrorism. Most reporters don't care. They are trapped in a world where the Bush administration lied to the country about an Iraq-al Qaeda connection, and no amount of evidence to the contrary--not even the words of the fallen Iraqi regime itself -- can convince them to re-examine their mistaken assumptions.
Bush administration officials, meanwhile, tell us that the Iraq war is the central front in the war on terror and that American national security depends on winning there. And yet they are too busy or too tired or too lazy to correct these fundamental misperceptions about the case for war, the most important decision of the Bush presidency.
To which might be added—too demoralised. On both sides of the pond, the fall-out from the flawed aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, the subsequent mass re-writing of history and the mass hysteria and descent into irrationality which have ensued, not to mention the desire to avoid anything which might focus attention on the mistakes that were made (which were rather more devastating, if one takes the view that Saddam’s WMD did exist and are now in the hands of other rogue states, than anything dreamed up by the anti-war brigade) has meant that faced with any evidence that they were actually right to do what they did (if not the way in which they did it) the reaction of both the American and British governments is to put their heads under a pillow and hope it all just goes away.