From a reader:

Dear Jonah,
So, I see the NY Times has recycled old news by reminding us that the CIA never believed Bin Laden had any important ties to Sadaam.
Of course, this is also the same CIA that insisted Sadaam still had huge stockpiles of WMD in 2003.
Why take the CIA seriously in one instance but not the other? Hasn’t the CIA degenerated into just another civil service bureaucracy whose employees abuse their positions to promote their own domestic political agendas?
So what if Sadaam and bin Laden, at some point in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, expressed distrust of each other? This is being used out of context as proof that no rapprochement between the two could ever have been possible, even at a later time, in the later 1990’s and early 2000’s, when both men were increasingly beleaguered. As I recall, Clinton’s reluctance to take out the Taliban was based on the expectation that bin Laden would immediately relocate to Iraq, where he would be even harder to reach. If Sadaam did not trust bin Laden, remember two things: he did not trust anyone else either, and bin Laden would be much more tractable and useful to him as a “house guest”.
Since the Bush White House was receiving essentially the same intelligence that was given to the Clinton White House, it should be obvious that a decision to topple the Taliban de facto required toppling Sadaam, in order to deny al Qaeda its only remaining potential (and still well-armed) Sunni benefactor, a benefactor which probably did still have a fair amount of its WMD intact as late as 2001.
As I recall, the pre-emptive strike against Iraq was not based on the pre-existence of an established alliance between Sadaam and bin Laden, but a need to make sure that such an alliance, already inchoate, never had a chance to develop to a stage satisfactory for the editors of the NY Times to recognize