In addition to the IDA report, which I think is more definitive because it is an analysis of documents captured during the war and not simply derived from interviews with captured senior leaders, there are other good reasons to think Iraq and al Qaeda had more of a relationship than widely believed by the net left.

To start, this was the view of Carl Ford, the head of the State Department’s Intelligence and Research bureau before the war. The left has singled out Mr. Ford for praise because his bureau dissented on the claim that Iraq had an active nuclear program before the war. Also, Mr. Ford was the star witness against John Bolton in 2005 during his contentious nomination hearing to be the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. Thanks to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, we now know that Mr. Ford in his memo to Secretary of State Colin Powell before his 2003 speech to the United Nations believed Saddam Hussein was strengthening his relationship with al Qaeda before the war. “Our evidence suggests that Baghdad is strengthening a relationship with al-Qaeda that dates back to the mid-1990s, when senior Iraqi intelligence officers established contact with the network in several countries,” he wrote…

Finally, I have on three occasions–once in public and twice in private–asked the Prime Minister of Kurdistan, Barham Salih, whether he stood by this particular intelligence from 2002. He has on all these occasions said he did.