Saddam's "smoking gun" of a paper trail....

Well, it's taken David a couple of weeks, but he's getting caught up on recent news. Well, actually he's getting caught up on news from a couple of weeks ago. Specifically, in his latest column, Dave discusses the release of Saddam Huessein's documents by the U.S. Director of National Intelligence due to pressure from Congress and neo-conservatives. As luck would have it, similar to every piece of information released by the Bush administration thus far that has been cherry-picked for greatest partisan advantage, these documents incontrovertibly lead to the conclusion that Saddam had relationships with and supported al Qaida. Or at least Dave would have you believe.

That's interesting, considering that President Bush himself said that there aren't any connections between Iraq and al Qaida.

However, as Dave's appeared to be hiding under a rock the past couple of weeks, he relies on the efforts of the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes to help co-write his latest column. Specifically, Hayes writes of meetings between Saddam's and Osama's reps to broadcast a radical preacher's speeches in Iraq.

Broadcasting the speeches of a preacher? Is this the "mushroom cloud" Condoleeza Rice warned us of as they whipped the country into a pre-war frenzy?

It should be noted that this message was hand-written and lacked an official seal. Also, this document was dated from the mid-90s and the relationship between Iraq and al Qaida never seemed to pick up much steam after the broadcast-preacher agreement. Dave cites other documents that purport to highlight attempts by various elements from Saddam's regime to establish connections with al Qaida, to no avail. Eventually these efforts came to a head with a June 2001 fax from the Iraqi ambassador to the Philippines stating that Iraqi is "not on speaking terms" with Abu Sayyaf, al Qaida's splinter group in the Philippines.

So Iraq was "not on speaking terms" with al Qaida and other Muslim fanatic terrorist groups by the time the worst terrorist attack on American soil was committed? If Dave meant to prove connections between Iraq and al Qaida, it might've been wiser for him to omit that one little detail, as it blows holes in the rest of his argument.

And is it just me, or is the fact that Dave is writing a column on Saddam's 'paper trail' when the hot topic over the past few weeks has been immigration mean that Dave is hoping to dodge a controversial subject in a favor of a topic that nobody really cares about?

If there were any "smoking guns" in the documents released so far, everybody would know about it by now. The fact that nobody is paying attention is testament to the fact that Dave is intellectually lazy, writing on a topic that garners little attention in an attempt to not garner any onto himself. Usually there is a smattering of anti-Reinhard letters in the paper for a few days after one of his columns assualt Oregonian readers' rationality. I'd be surprised if that's the case with this column.

Also, perhaps the nearest thing to a "smoking gun" in Saddam's paper trail is the fact that Saddam was just so weak, and the United States failed to identify him as such. As Tim Naftall makes clear in Slate:

Saddam never stopped growling, even after the destruction of his nuclear, chemical, and biological programs. And Washington fell for it. The Clinton and George W. Bush administrations could not tell the difference between the Saddam who invaded Kuwait out of arrogance and the Saddam who pretended to be powerful so he could fend off his enemies. Why didn't we see that on the international stage he was the humbug behind the screen playing Wizard of Oz?