There he goes again. Bill Safire is beat­ing the same old drum about al Qaeda and Sad­dam using faulty logic. This time, he points to the 17-page let­ter cap­tured from Has­san Gul, who appears to have been act­ing as a courier between Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and al Qaeda lead­er­ship in Afghanistan. The let­ter asks al Qaeda to rein­force Ansar al-Islam in its attacks on Shi’ite tar­gets in the hopes of spark­ing a “sec­tar­ian war.” Zar­qawi appears to be the author of the let­ter, accord­ing to U.S. sources.
(By the way, Sec­re­tary of Defense Don­ald Rums­feld has expressed uncer­tainty regard­ing the authen­tic­ity of the Zar­qawi memo.)
Bill Safire toots his own horn:

On Sept. 24, 2001 — not two weeks after 9/11 — Kur­dish sources led me to report: “The clear link between the ter­ror­ist in hid­ing [Osama] and the ter­ror­ist in power [Sad­dam] can be found in Kur­dis­tan.… The Iraqi dic­ta­tor has armed and financed a fifth col­umn of Al Qaeda mul­lahs and ter­ror­ists.… Some 400 ‘Arab Afghan’ mer­ce­nar­ies … have already mur­dered a high Kur­dish offi­cial as well as a Mus­lim scholar who dared to inter­pret the Koran humanely.”

Well, sure there were and are links between Ansar and al Qaeda. I pointed that out in Jan­u­ary last year. But a link­age between Ansar and Osama doesn’t prove a link­age between Sad­dam Hus­sein and Osama. As I wrote then:

No doubt Sad­dam is pro­vid­ing fund­ing to the group in an effort to desta­bilze Iraqi Kur­dis­tan. But other coun­tries are fund­ing the group, includ­ing Iran and Turkey. The Kurds real­ize that their neigh­bors have no inter­est in see­ing an inde­pen­dent Kur­dis­tan and will sup­port any group that might thwart those ambi­tions.
… Because [Ansar al-Islam mil­i­tants] are oper­at­ing in an area that has been freed of Baghdad’s influ­ence I find it hard to believe that they are oper­at­ing with Saddam’s “bless­ing.” More likely, Tehran is help­ing them more than Bagh­dad is, and the Iraqi pres­i­dent is tak­ing advan­tage of their pres­ence to keep the Kurds off bal­ance. Get­ting money from both Sad­dam and al Qa’ida does not log­i­cally lead to a link­age between Iraq and Osama bin Laden. Ansar wants to destroy the Kur­dish sec­u­lar gov­ern­ment and set up an Islamic state under shar’ia, the harsh Islamic law of the Tal­iban. Bagh­dad, how­ever, is a sec­u­lar gang­ster regime. If Ansar were ever to gain con­trol of Iraqi Kur­dis­tan — an impos­si­ble dream for the insur­gents — Bagh­dad would imme­di­ately launch a cam­paign to crush the Islamists, who have no inten­tion of co-existing peace­fully with Sad­dam. I might add, too, that if the above sce­nario were to come to pass, the United States would be glad to see Sad­dam wipe them out.

Safire starts wrap­ping his flights of illog­i­cal link­ing with this quote: “Of the liberation’s three casus belli, one was to stop mass mur­der, blood­ier than in Kosovo; we are find­ing hor­rific mass graves in Iraq. Another was informed sus­pi­cion that a clear link existed between world ter­ror and Sad­dam; this ter­ror­ist plea for Qaeda rein­force­ments to kill Iraqi democ­racy is the smok­ing gun prov­ing that.“
Hm. Seems to me that link­ing Sad­dam to world ter­ror in early 2004 would require Sad­dam Hus­sein to actu­ally, oh, I don’t know, be in power and in con­trol of Iraq. Last time I checked he was a guest of the U.S. mil­i­tary and hadn’t been run­ning the coun­try since April 2003. Safire is becom­ing some kind of Jaubert-like fig­ure on this meme that has been denied by almost every­one — now — in the White House. The excep­tion being, of course, Vice Pres­i­dent DIck Cheney.
I have no doubt al Qaeda and Ansar are oper­at­ing in Iraq and attempt­ing to spark a civil war. It’s part of the ter­ror network’s spring offen­sive. But Iraq is one of the bat­tle­fields because the chaos and inse­cu­rity of the coun­try fol­low­ing the inva­sion last March has given Islamist ter­ror­ists a freer range of move­ment in a coun­try that pre­vi­ously was closed to them. The failed poli­cies of the Bush Defense Depart­ment regard­ing Iraq has cre­ated a failed state, which is con­ducive to allow­ing ter­ror­ists to work and live. The Zar­qawi memo isn’t proof a Saddam’s ties to al Qaeda; it’s proof that the Amer­i­can occu­pa­tion of Iraq opened up oppor­tu­ni­ties for al Qaeda to act where it couldn’t before.