The Left hyperventilates every time President Bush connects 9/11 to the War on Terror and the WOT to Iraq. They just can't bring themselves to believe that Islamic terrorists like al Qaida and more secular terrorists like Saddam Hussein might actually cooperate. Any claim that they do is regarded by them as another one of Bush's multitudinous lies. They point animatedly at the 9/11 Commission report's finding that no link has been found between Saddam and 9/11 as if that were all the proof they needed that no linkage exists between Saddam and al Qaida.
Melanie Phillips has collated the evidence, however, and as happens with clock-like regularity, it turns out that the President's critics have to simply ignore a mountain of fact in order to maintain that there was no connection between Iraq and al Qaida. Here's one significant example of the many she discusses:
The Sunday Telegraph's Con Coughlin, Saddam's biographer, got hold of a top secret memo made available by Iraq's interim government which explicitly linked Saddam's regime to Mohammed Atta, the terrorist mastermind behind 9/11, and the Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. Written to Saddam by the former head of Iraq's intelligence service, it contained the following incendiary passage:
'Mohammed Atta, an Egyptian national, came with Abu Ammer (an Arabic nom-de-guerre - his real identity is unknown) and we hosted him in Abu Nidal's house at al-Dora under our direct supervision. We arranged a work programme for him for three days with a team dedicated to working with him . . . He displayed extraordinary effort and showed a firm commitment to lead the team which will be responsible for attacking the targets that we have agreed to destroy'.
Note the date: July 1 2001. Note the phrases 'the targets that we have agreed to destroy' and 'under our direct supervision'.
There's much more information like this at her site. Of course, it's not proof, but then nothing would constitute proof for the Left. Even if Hussein admitted that he personally financed the 9/11 operation the Left would protest that he was tortured by Alberto Gonzalez in order to extract the confession from him. These folk are in deep denial. Phillips closes her piece with this:
As I have noted on innumerable occasions, none of this evidence is cast-iron. But there is so much of it, it is simply not credible that Saddam had no links with al Qaeda, even if he was not personally involved in 9/11. And as for his links with other terror outfits, this is indisputable. Saddam's Iraq was the principal training ground for Islamic terrorism.
The anti-western left has, over the course of history, fallen time after time for the propaganda of murderous tyrants who offered a handy platform for bashing the home society by providing the alibi of conscience. The investment of personal, political and moral identity that this represents is so immense that after a short while such gullible dupes are simply incapable of recognizing reality even when it stares them in the face. Hence their stupefaction when confronted with the enormities of Robespierre, Stalin or Mao. To that list must now be added the Islamic jihad and Saddam Hussein. The difference is that this time these useful idiots have taken the middling people of Britain and Europe - and increasingly, it seems, of America - with them into the land of deluded wishful thinking. The result could be that this war against the jihadi terror could be lost -- at home.
Read the whole thing.