I still hate...

[Sir O]

its not about the WMD's its about combatting terrorism. you think Saddam wasn't helping terror cells around the world attack America and their allies?

No. There's no evidence at all to back up the claim that Saddam Hussein was working with any terrorist group against the US. There's a pretty good interview with Al Qaeda expert Peter Bergen in TPM which I think, gives a good picture of how Al Qaeda works and how claims that AQ and Iraq were working together were unsubstantiated.

Part One Of Interview

Part Two Of Interview

But, you know, I spent years researching my book on al Qaida, and one of the striking things is how few Iraqis there are in the organization. I mean, everybody has an alias in al Qaida. They're called al Misri, which means you're from Egypt, or you're called al Jazeera, which means you're from Algeria. Very few are al Iraqi. The only one who is significant is a guy called Mahmud Salim who's actually in prison, and has been in prison since '98, who was a significant player in the leadership of al Qaida.

But obviously bin Laden is a Saudi, most of the top leadership is Egyptian, rather than Iraqi. And if you do a breakdown of who went through the training camps, the overwhelming numbers, from the Arab world at least, would be Saudis, Yemenis, and Algerians. Those would be in the top three. Iraqis really would have come down [the list]. And also, no one from Iran. There were no al Iranis in the groups.

TPM: Now that would be at least a sectarian divide?

BERGEN: Actually there's more evidence for al Qaida playing footsie with Hezbollah in the early '90s. You know, if you look at the model, the al Qaida model is the Hezbollah model. And this goes back to the question du jour--which is, what's happening in Iraq?

If you accept the fact -- and it is a fact -- that bin Laden modeled al Qaida's tactics on Hezbollah in Beirut in the mid '80s, when the bomb went off and we withdrew, and also on Mogadishu, where 18 Americans were killed and then we also withdrew ... If you accept that as their model, then that's the model they're going to apply in Iraq. That would explain the Jordanian embassy, the UN Headquarters, and the future attacks there are undoubtedly going to be against US soldiers there.

TPM: ...getting rid of Saddam had its own immediate advantages (non-conventional weapons, threat to his neighbors, and so forth) but that changing the government in Baghdad could basically trigger a kind of domino effect in the region.

BERGEN: I just saw that as a sort of theological position.

TPM: Yeah, there was that position and then the contrary position, saying it's going to domino the other direction.

BERGEN: I'm going to firmly sit on the fence, because I think all we can say about the events of the Iraq war is the following: We speeded up history, right? Because we volunteered for this, we really didn't have to do it. There wasn't an imminent threat, you know there was no link to 9/11. Saddam's a horrible human being, but there are plenty of those around. So we volunteered essentially, and we basically sped history up. I know that you're a professional historian. When you speed history up, to say [with] rose-tinted spectacles, it's all going to be great, there's going to be democracy around the Middle East and everyone's going to love us, I mean that is as wrong as saying this will be the biggest disaster of all time. We just don't know.