I wish the intelligence community and the Democrats would get their stories straight. First we were told ad nauseam that there were no links between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaida. But now, it seems that there were links.
The U.S. intelligence community accurately predicted months before the Iraq war that al-Qaeda would link up with elements from former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's regime and militant Islamists to conduct terrorist attacks against U.S. forces in that country, according to a report released today by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
Captain Ed compares Al Qaida to a pack of hyenas, descending on any corpse available. He also points out that we stated early in the war that we would rather they concentrate on fighting us over there rather that attacking civilians here. It seems to me that that strategy has worked rather well, but don't expect liberals to see things that way. More from Captain Ed:
Jay Rockefeller wants to use the report to show what a folly it was to invade Iraq, but part of the reason we invaded Iraq was precisely to avoid Saddam and his henchmen from partnering with al-Qaeda. These same intel agencies produced this prediction because they also had intelligence that Saddam and AQ had already established contacts with each other. With the Taliban a dead letter, the next obvious choice in the region for AQ was Iraq, which already had a bitter military dispute with the US going for 12 years.
Since Saddam had never complied with the cease-fire and the UN resolutions on many issues, and in fact continued to fire on no-fly patrols, a state of war already existed. With that in mind and with the intel that AQ and Ba'athists would be likely allies in the near future, the US acted to secure its flank in the Middle East by eliminating the source of the 12-year war that had been ongoing. And as it turned out, it was a good thing we did -- because we found out that our allies at the UN had been undermining the "box" that supposedly held Saddam for years, stuffing billions of dollars into his pockets and military hardware in his presidential palaces.
The CIA predicted this alliance before the invasion. That should put paid to the idea that no one but George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that al-Qaeda would work with secular dictators like Saddam Hussein and other Ba'athists.
Except for some trolls.
NRO blog points out that a new report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee backs up the claim that Valerie Plame did suggest her husband for the Niger trip, contrary to her testimony. There's a word for that. *ahem*
Jeff Goldstein discusses an excellent e-mail by Dan Collins' on the report, adding lots of commentary, then discredits Tbogg's attempt to spin the polls about how soon Iraqis want us to leave.
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