Andrew Sullivan can't help himself

He's allowed himself to be grudgingly persuaded that the President he once worshipped has made a hash of the Iraq war, but he'll still grasp eagerly at any evidence which discredits prewar antiwar arguments -- even when said evidence doesn't, you know, actually do that:

"[N]ew documents", he writes, "seem to me to blow a big hole through the arguments of those who believe that "secular" Saddam would never cooperate with Osama bin Laden's Jihadists[.]"

What those documents say:

Bin Laden asked that Iraq broadcast the lectures of Suleiman al Ouda, a radical Saudi preacher, and suggested "carrying out joint operations against foreign forces" in Saudi Arabia. According to the document, Saddam's presidency was informed of the details of the meeting on March 4, 1995, and Saddam agreed to dedicate a program for them on the radio. The document states that further "development of the relationship and cooperation between the two parties to be left according to what's open [in the future] based on dialogue and agreement on other ways of cooperation.

Surely we're past the point where speculations on what Saddam Hussein, if left in power long enough, might someday, conceivably, hypothetically done in concert with Al Qaeda matter at all. The fact (according to our current state of knowledge) is that all tentative probing efforts toward such collaborative actions had fizzled out long before the U.S. decided to depose Hussein -- something like 1999, I believe. That there were feelers sent out in 1995 is not news.