Al Qaeda was never in Saddam-controlled Iraq, right?

Wrong (Agence France Presse via Weekly Standard Blog):

The Egyptian commander of Al-Qaeda forces in Iraq who was killed in a US-backed raid this month arrived in Baghdad under Saddam Hussein’s rule, a press report on Wednesday quoted his widow as saying.

. . .

She told her interrogators that her husband travelled to Iraq from the United Arab Emirates in 2002, the year before Saddam’s overthrow by US-led troops, the Al-Bayan newspaper reported.

“He arrived in Baghdad before me and I followed him shortly afterwards coming from Amman,” the paper, which is close to Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, quoted her as saying.

“We lived in Karrada (in central Baghdad) for seven months, then in Amiriya (in west Baghdad), then we moved to Baghdad al-Jadida (in the east) in 2003 when Saddam’s regime fell with the entry of Americans into the city,” she said.

Hasna’s reported comments are significant because in the run-up to the US-led invasion, US officials alleged links between Saddam Hussein’s secular regime and Al-Qaeda, which were strenuously denied at the time.

I have always held that the WMD justification for liberating Iraq was weaker than the issue of al-Qaeda’s presence there. I would suspect most Americans would agree with me.

This shows us that history and historians will view said liberation very differently than the critics who hounded George W. Bush on his way out of office last year.

Cross-posted to RWL

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