Exhaustive review sponsored by the Pentagon finds NO link between Saddam, al Qaida

dapperdan said

In an odd way, I agree with you. It's virtually impossible, without the passage of time and the benefit of looking back on the history of the relationship with Saddam, to get an accurate picture of what was really going on with Saddam. What we get, and will continune to get, are tidbits of intelligence information that leak out in dribs and drabs, that over the course of time, we'll have to try to piece together. Obviously, this is just a piece of the puzzle. But it's a piece that pretty definitively suggests that Saddam was not the benign dictator that the Headline of this thread suggests.

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I don't necessarily buy into this argument here--seems to me that your assuming that over time, suddenly they'll be this large amount of information which will vindicate the administration's misleading propaganda campaign to link 9-11/Al-Queda, etc. with Hussein. This assessment completely belies what every expert in the Middle East said before and after the war: Hussein was a secular ruler; he was suspicious of radical jihadists organizations; the evidence of this "connnection" seems contrived and false; that blog was, as I stated before a beautiful example of spin.

Sorry, but only by using crass reductionist logic can a very tangible link between Hussein and terrorist organizations, especially Al-Queda be made. By this logic the U.S. should invade several other M.E. countries--where leaders and members in the government have a proven, more tangible connection to terrorism. Sorry, its a poor rationale now as it was then to invade Iraq.

Last, I don't think it was the OP's intention to make Hussein out to be a benign dicatator, I think your last point is very misleading too. I don't think anybody here will depict him as less than dispicable.