Connected.(The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America)(Book Review)

The Connection: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America, by Stephen F. Hayes (HarperCollins, 224 pp., $19.95)

'PANEL Finds No Qaeda-Iraq Tie," screamed the New York Times headline. The Times could not have been more wrong. The 9/11 Commission staff had released a report containing an offhand paragraph that appeared to undermine the notion of any meaningful relationship between Saddam Hussein's regime and Osama bin Laden's international terrorist network. But even the commission staff grudgingly acknowledged that there had been contacts, though it left the impression these had been unconsummated dalliances.

It's a shame that neither the Times nor the commission seems to have read Stephen F. Hayes's revelatory new book, The Connection. Hayes, a Weekly Standard staff writer, has for months tirelessly probed the shadowy relations between Iraq and al-Qaeda. The bottom line of his fast-paced eye-opener is that the "Qaeda-Iraq tie" is established by overwhelming evidence, and posed a serious threat to the United States.

Its roots date back to 1990, shortly after the Islamist coup that converted Sudan into a terrorist haven to which bin Laden would move his fledgling al-Qaeda. Saddam had invaded Kuwait, and found himself under siege by a U.S.-led coalition--which in turn provoked Sudanese Islamist leader Hassan al-Turabi, bin Laden, and others to begin calling for worldwide jihad. Turabi embraced Saddam and brokered an uneasy accommodation between Iraq and the militants--inducing the secular Baathist to incorporate elements of Islamic sharia into Iraqi law, while convincing wary militants that aligning with Saddam was a necessary evil.

It worked. Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS) records recovered last year reveal that, by 1992, bin Laden was already regarded as an IIS asset, while Saddam was hosting Ayman al-Zawahiri of Egyptian Islamic Jihad--who would later become bin Laden's second-in-command. By 1994, the two sides came to an understanding: Al-Qaeda would not work against Iraq, but would cooperate with it on some projects, including weapons development. IIS provided al-Qaeda with phony passports; Iraq also set up secret training camps for terrorists, where the IIS special-operations division provided schooling in assassination and hijacking.

If these early contacts now appear jarring, it owes to the verve with which the anti-Bush, anti-Iraq-war propagandists have whitewashed Saddam's promotion of terrorism--a history that, Hayes recounts, was once a staple of Clinton-administration rhetoric, and led one defector (an IIS terrorist-trainer) to observe that "Saddam is the father and the grandfather of terrorists."

Hayes convincingly dispels the myth that a "heathen" like Saddam could never have made common cause with radical Muslims. Saddam was more an opportunist than a committed secularist. In the 1990s, as necessity drove him further into the arms of militants, he energetically countered that secularist image, infusing his speeches with jihadist fire and assiduously courting radicals through "Popular Islamic Conferences" that brought together the most vicious militant organizations on earth.