It's been a long time since I had to use this information but it is useful to reintroduce it from time to time.
The reason Bush went into Iraq and his father didn't is that the political calculation had greatly changed between the end of the Gulf War and 9-11 . There was no al- Qaeda in 1990 and no connection between Saddam and bin-Laden . Why did Bush think that there was a connection between al_Qaeda and Saddam ? Perhaps because that was the conventional wisdom of the former administration,the intelligence agencies , and the MSM prior to 9-11 ?
January 14, 1999, ABC News correspondent Sheila MacVicar reported during a prime time telecast how a few months after the embassy bombings in Africa and U.S. retaliation against Sudan, bin Laden “reaches out to his friends in Iraq and Sudan.” MacVicar said “ABC News has learned that in December, an Iraqi intelligence chief, named Farouk Hijazi made a secret trip to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden. Three intelligence agencies tell ABC News they cannot be certain what was discussed, but almost certainly, they say, bin Laden has been told he would be welcome in Baghdad.”
ABC News: Iraqi intelligence chief met with bin Laden in December 1998
Stephen Hayes at Weekly Standard wrote a book about the connection between al-Qaeda and Saddam and also laid out much of the case in a seperate essay .
The Connection
He further points out that an indictment that the Clinton Adm. made against Bin Laden clearly mentioned the link to Saddam :
Read the whole Hayes article . What he points out was the conventional wisdom prior to the invasion. Since the invasion there has been a different spin from the MSM and the Democrats .
The founder of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia was Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
He was in Iraq before we were. He fled to Iraq because he, and many others like him were chased out of Afghanistan. He was also treated in a Baghdad hospital for wounds he received in Afghanistan. He settled there either by consent of Saddam or because Saddam was in no position to deny him . The group he was working with;Ansar -al Islam ,was operational with consent by Saddam well before OIF.
Zarqawi regularily wrote letters to Ayman al-Zawahiri ,some of which we intercepted . Those letters detailed his plan to incite civil war in the new Iraq by attacking the Shia . To a degree he was successful in the strategy because at the other end there was as we have learned outside agitation by Iran . What is the common connection . The violence is being perpetrated by non-Iraqi agitators.
It is useful to note that al-Zawahiri cautioned Zarqawi at one point that the violence he was doing was so gruesome that it could turn his potential Sunni allies in Iraq against him .This too has come to pass and has been a major factor in the success of the "surge".
Yes you can point to a single attack and claim progress is not happening ;but the truth is that we are still a month away from the first report from the commander ,Gen. Petraeus of what should be an extended operation ,and both US and Iraqi civilian casualties are down. The MSM has even been a reluctant reporter of that fact. The truth is that cities that had been AQM safe havens like . Fallujah or Baqubah have been largely cleaned out ;and are under local control by folks who want nothing to do with the extremists.
Attacks against civilians in a relatively unguarded section of the nation may be sensational ,but I gurarantee the people in the regions around Kurdistan will not let this type of attack become the rule.
What is being acheived in Iraq ? Even if the political situation is unresolved we have almost completed whipping the al -Qaeda forces in the country and discredited them in the eyes of their former natural allies .The only thing taht can stop us at this point is ourselves .