With news surrounding the fate of al Masri still up in the error, at least attention is paid to the fact that, like Zarqawi, he was a foreigner (Egyptian) and, also like Zarqawi, (cf. George Tenet’s February 2003 congressional testimony) went to Iraq to set up al Qaeda cells before our invasion in March 2003.

When we consider in addition the presence of al Qaeda affiliates in Kurdistan, the flight to Baghdad of Abdul Rahman Yasin, implicated in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, or the entry of Ramsey Yusef into the U.S. on an Iraqi passport, there is no doubt about Saddam’s working relationship with al Qaeda. So is the real question not the existence of such a link, but that in a post 9/11 climate the relationship of Saddam with those who were intent on taking down the World Trade Center, whether in 1993 or 2001, was simply not enough a casus belli to depose him — or that it still was by the measure of our costs incurred by 2003, or 2004, but not by 2005-7?