Recently Barack Obama stated on March 19, 2008 in Fayetteville, NC that when the United Stateswaged war with Iraq “There was not any evidence that Iraq was responsible for the attacks of September 11, or that Iraq had operational ties to the al Qaeda terrorists who carried them out. By launching a war based on faulty premises and bad intelligence, President Bush failed Wilson’s test. So did Congress when it voted to give him the authority to wage war.”

There is a myth being populated by the anti-war left and main stream media that al-Qaeda was not in Iraq until the US invasion. When in reality, al-Qaeda was in Iraq prior to the US Invasion. The recent release of the Pentagon’s analysis of Saddam’s papers reveals not only that al-Qaeda was in Iraq, but that Saddam recruited, trained, and financed al-Qaeda as well as other terrorist organizations. How can this be you ask? Well the Pentagon Papers on Saddam specifically state that Saddam and Osama bin Laden had “considerable operational overlap…when monitoring, contacting, financing, and training the regional groups involved in terrorism. Saddam provided training and motivation to revolutionary pan-Arab nationalists in the region. Osama bin Laden provided training and motivation for violent revolutionary Islamists in the region. They were recruiting within the same demographic, spouting much the same rhetoric, and promoting a common historicalnarrative that promised a return to a glorious past.”[1]

Read the article for yourself.

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[1] Woods, Kevin M., and James Lacey, Iraqi Perspectives Project: Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights From Captured Iraqi Documents (Institute for Defense Analysis, 2008), p.41-42.