"...we ended up with five or six sentences that were bullet-proof. We could say them, they are factual, they are exactly accurate. They demonstrate that there are in fact al Qaeda in Iraq."
-Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld, September 27, 2002

"This study found no "smoking gun " (i.e., direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda."
- Institute for Defense Analyses Report, November 2007

The Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) report-dated November 2007 yet only released this week-titled "Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents" found no direct connection between Saddam's Iraq and al Qaeda, definitively putting to rest this longstanding Bush Administration assertion. Even with a dearth of evidence to support the claim, this had been a central conservative argument as to why U.S. intervention was necessary before the war, and was used to justify the war in subsequent years. In fact, as the study proves, Hussein and Osama bin Laden not only never cooperated on an operational level, but perceived each other as competitors with vastly opposing visions for the greater Middle East.

Saddam cracked down on radical Islamic groups in Iraq:
"Whether attempting to overthow the Egyptian government or the Kuwait royal family, the vision was always about the centrality of Saddam and his pan-Arab vision - and never about the glory of Islam or some modem-day caliphate. To the fundamentalist leadership of al Qaeda, Saddam represented the worst kind o f "apostate" regime - a secular police state well practiced in suppressing internal challenges. The Saddam regime was very concerned about the internal threat posed by various Islamist movements. Crackdowns, arrests, and monitoring of Islamic radical movements were common in Iraq." [Institute for Defense Analyses Report, November 2007]

Competing visions made cooperation between Saddam and bin Laden impossible: "Both wanted to create a single powerful state that would take its place as a global superpower. But the similarities ended there: bin Laden wanted-and still wants-to restore the Islamic caliphate while Saddam dreamed more narrowly of being the secular ruler of a united Arab nation. These competing visions made any significant long-term compromise between them highly unlikely." [Institute for Defense Analyses Report, November 2007]

Saddam's regime and al Qaeda not only competed for resources, but also had "incompatible long-term goals" for the future of the greater Middle East: "While it is not surprising that Saddam would endeavor to support revolutionary groups, it is important to recognize that many of these nationalist groups changed in the late 1990s. Saddam viewed these groups through the eyes of a pan-Arab revolutionary, while the leaders of the growing Islamist movements viewed them as potential affiliates for their Jihad. In other words, two movements, one pan-Arab and the other pan-Islamic, were seeking and developing supporters from the same demographic pool." [Institute for Defense Analyses Report, November 2007]