Saddam And al Qaeda

Eli Lake's parsing of the report here. His points are well taken but they do not amount to a convincing rebuttal of the fact that Saddam was not in any formal relationship with al Qaeda, and did not have the WMDs to empower them in the way that Mr Lake and many others insisted was the case in 2002 and 2003. Of course, Saddam was characterologically capable of doing almost anything. He was in many ways his own weapon of mass destruction. But we now know - and a few said so before the war - that the "mass" in that description was simply unfounded.

He was always going to be a headache. The notion that he was easily containable and not a potential threat doesn't persuade me. But he wasn't as big a threat as we thought; and no Saddam headache would have been worse than the nightmare we are now trapped in. I'm afraid that's the truth. Advantage: Jihadism.