The Iraq Connection

THE CENTRAL argument against the Iraq invasion has been for some time that Iraq is a diversion in the War on Terror. The main front was in Afghanistan and in breaking up terror cells around the world, but not in Iraq.

Of course, nobody has said that the 9/11 attacks were planned in Saddam´s office in Baghdad, but the evidence is pretty clear that Saddamite Iraq had allied itself with Al Qaeda and saw itself as part of a coalition of forces opposing the power of the United States. Stephen F. Hayes and Thomas Joscelyn ventilate some of the intelligence that the MSM would rather not talk about that makes it pretty clear that there were relationships between Iraq and Al Qaeda.

We have been told by Jordan´s King Abdullah that his government knew Abu Musab al Zarqawi was in Iraq before the war and requested that the former Iraqi regime deport him. We have been told by Time magazine that confidential documents from Zarqawi´s group, recovered in recent raids, indicate other jihadists had joined him in Baghdad before the Hussein regime fell. We have been told by one of those jihadists that he was with Zarqawi in Baghdad before the war. We have been told by Ayad Allawi, former Iraqi prime minister and a longtime CIA source, that other Iraqi Intelligence documents indicate bin Laden´s top deputy was in Iraq for a jihadist conference in September 1999.

It is stretching credibility to imagine that al Zarqawi was operating in Iraq without the approval of Saddam. More interesting is the question whether the Baathist opposition is still allied with al Zarqawi or whether they are now ready to do a deal that gets them out of the uncomfortable business of civil war and back into the political scene in post-Saddam Baghdad.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

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Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

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In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

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E. G. West, Education and the State

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Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
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Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
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