I understand that the conventional wisdom and partisan answer is that the two sides "couldn't" work together pre invasion but how many times do we need to see them working together now to re-think that mindset? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? A thousand?

And Saddam had nuclear weapons stuffed up his buttcrack, so there really were wmd's in Iraq.

Frankly, it's neither partisan not conventional. There were times when it was damned unpopular. But the fact is that it's true. There weren't no operational linkes between Saddam Hussein's regime and Al Quaeda or related/convergent entities.

Basically, for the same reason that Al Quaeda threatens the Muslim government of Pakistan.

Now, wishing real hard don't unravel the past and make it how you wish.

Don't be so sure that they wouldn't cooperate pre invasion unless you've interviewed all these guys involved, which I know you haven't.

Well, I haven't been out there torturing anyone if that's what you are suggesting. I'm sure that waterboarding is a fine sport and pleasant in its own way, but its not a path to reliable information.

In the larger sense, any historian can tell you that while primary sources are invaluable, there's a lot of rewriting of histories and post-facto rationalization that goes on. Particularly if its in controversial or fluid situations.

There's probably a lot of former Saddamites who are now proclaiming loudly that they were always children of Jihad, yadda yadda yadda. That has more to do with who signs their paycheques now than with what they actually did and thought at the time.

I'm always prepared to revisit an opinion. But at this point, the historical questions of Saddam's relationship to Al Quaeda are essentially settled, as are the historical issues of wmd's.

The real issue is how to confront the insurgency and make the occupation work. On those issues, its been failure all around.

Okay, Ike, here it is.

You don't seem like a bad guy. You seem pretty sincere about the whole thing. So I'm not going to rip into you, I'm not going to get sarcastic, nothing like that.

But you're wrong, and I'm going to have to do a bit of work to explain the flaw in your process to you. So bear with me.

What you got to know about me is that I'm a practical guy. These days I sit at a desk and my job is all brain work and talking to people, but that's not where I'm from. I'm from the east. The hill country out east, little place called Restigouche. Beautiful a place as god ever made but dirt poor.

My dad worked at the mill, like his dad, and like his grandad, and like my brother now. But when I was growing up, my dad also ran a garage as well. My mom worked, they didn't have day care back then, so basically, I wound up growing up at the garage. By eight years old I was fixing flats and changing tires. By the time I was fourteen I was pulling engines out of cars. Along the way growing up, I learned quite a bit of carpentary, some electrical, some plumbing, bits and pieces of this and that. But mostly, the big thing, is that I learned to think.

Now here's the thing: When you're fixing a car, it don't matter whether you're Republican or Democrat, it don't matter whether you're liberal or conservative, don't matter if you're an anarchist, a communist or the most godfearing christian on earth. It just don't matter. The car just don't care what you are. The problem don't care what you are.

This is basically what reality is. It just is. It don't care who you are, what your politics are, or how sincere your beliefs are. None of that matters to reality, reality comes on its own terms.

Now the thing is, this is easy to lose sight of in this modern world, where its all talking heads arguing and arguing, and it starts to look as if sincerity and perserverance and will does indeed make all the difference. But it just ain't so.

Some people look at reality through the lens of their idealism and principles. They decide what's right, they decide what they want to believe, and then they go out looking for the evidence that will prove it.

And you know what? They find it. Or they find enough to satisfy them.

But the truth is that there's a difference between cars fixed by practical guys who take reality as it is, and cars fixed by idealistic guys who fit reality to their principles. The first works, the second don't.

Now, you're coming at me with this very sincere, very principled conviction that Iraq's Baathists were in cahoots with or had some meaningful ongoing relationship/partnership with Al Quaeda and such like.

I respect your sincerity.

But that dont' make it true.

Seriously now, what does your basic argument boil down to?

*The interrogation logs have not been released

*nowhere near all the Iraq documents have been released.

*In all of the recent Senate Intel reports both the CIA and DIA have said they have yet to do a conclusive review on this topic

*what made it into the report's conclusions were based on interviews with unknown people of unknown rank.

Is that it? What your argument amounts to is that no one has proven to your satisfaction that Saddam Hussein was not partnered up with Al Quaeda.

You got three problems there. First, it's impossible to prove a negative, no matter what anyone does, the goal posts will just keep moving around the playing field. That's just human nature.

Second, the basis of your argument rests on absence of evidence, well, I could use the same foundation to argue that Saddam was in league with Gray Space Aliens, or that Saddam was really Elvis and that mustache was just a disguise.

Fourth, you're reversing the onus. The proponent of a theory has the obligation to prove it. It's not up to anyone to disprove a theory, that connects up to that 'can't prove a negative' thing. The burden is on someone saying a thing is so to establish that it really is so. You've set it entirely backwards, see what I'm saying. It's like I say "The Earth is flat," and you say, "Don't seem likely." And I say, "well, all the evidence for a round earth isn't in yet..."

Third, you don't actually have much in the way of actual credible positive evidence to support your contention. There ain't no 'there' there, so to speak.

I'll be fair to you here. You think you've got positive evidence to support your argument. But let's take a look at it...

(like Izzat al Douri who has long been a jihadist and was Saddam Hussein's right hand man, later admitted Zarqawi was his "brother" and worked closely with him).

And Michael Jackson used to be black, now look at him. What does this really amount to? Not much actually.

But let me elaborate by going back to your main point. The fact that some flunkey of Saddam was now employed by Al Quaeda in Iraq.

Could this support your point? It could. But what you're ignoring is that there are a other explanations which are equally or more valid. Think about it: a) It could mean that Saddam and Al Quaeda were working together and sharing staff and photocopiers and suchlike. b) It could mean that Al Quaeda had infiltrated a mole into Saddam's command structure. c) It could mean that Saddam's intelligence was trying to penetrate Zaquari's organization. d) It coulc mean that the guy is just a mercenary and Zaquari made him a better offer than Maliki or Chalabi. e) It could be that after Saddam fell, he got 'born again' and got religion, people get religion all the time... I could go on for a while.

The point is that your theory could be the correct one, or any of these other ones could be the correct one. You can't just select the one you like and decide that's going to be the true one. In fact, without some more or better evidence, you can't select any of them. You just have a range of possibles.

So, your theory rests basically on a piece of evidence, and pieces of evidence that might be proof, or it might not be, no way to tell. If you can't tell whether it's really proof or not... well then, it isn't.

So, we could just leave it there, and you wouldn't be in good shape.

But the reality is that this is the universal problem, there's all sorts of information out there, its growing on trees. And the trick is to sort it out. Separate the wheat from the chaff, the good from the bad, see what something really means.

Take this wienerman working for Zaquari now. How do we sort that out? Well, credibly enough, you recognize the need for digging deeper. In a perfect world, we'd dig as deep as we needed to everywhere for everthing. But it ain't a perfect world, there's not enough time. Generally though the higher the stakes, the deeper the digging.

Sometimes you can pick by taking a closer look, or asking a few questions. Take this guy. He was with Saddam, now he's with Zaquari. Connection? Maybe. Did he move straight from Saddam to Zaquari? Or did he wind up there after a few years? If this is a recent development, and there are an intervening three years, well, you know... its not very persuasive.

And then there's practical issues. You figure that maybe the Mainstream Media and the Politicians aren't trustworthy. Maybe so.

But let's be serious here. Going up to the invasion of Iraq, the President of the United States made two key claims - that Iraq had wmd's, and that Iraq was allied with terrorists like Al Quaeda. Because of both of these things, or each of them, Iraq was an imminent threat to the US that could only be dealt with by war. There you go. That's Bush's case in a nutshell, the whole thing. No more, no less.

Now, both of these claims were challenged before the war. But nevertheless, they remained justifications for the war.

Since then, its been pretty much conclusively demonstrated beyond any reasonable shadow of a doubt that Iraq had no wmd's, no wmd resources, no operating wmd programs, and no actual capacity. End of that story.

You'll agree with me that this is very embarrassing for the Bush administration, very embarrassing for the United States, very bad overall.

So that leaves us with the other limb. The Al Quaeda/Jihadi connection. That, has also failed to materialize in any substantive way.

In fact, its failure to materialize or be substantiated in any significant way is a major eyesore.

It is such an embarrassment that Dick Cheney is still going around humiliating the United States by uttering that 'meeting in Czechoslovakia between Saddam's people and Osama's people' crap.

Let's get serious here: Do you think that if the Bush administration had one piece of evidence on this subject that was a bit credible, that they'd sit on it? That they'd hide it away.

Jesus H. Christ man, this is an Administration that burned a CIA agent when her husband stepped out of line. They basically torched an entire CIA department. They've got a long history of 'declassifying' anything and everything that will help them.

If there was anything anywhere, you can be certain they would make sure we heard about it.

And let's be very clear here. What with their credibility on the line, what with it being the sole surviving possible credible justification, what with Iraq being in such bad shape, they are extremely highly motivated to have it found.

Do you think if they had *anything* that Bill O'Reilly and Ann Coulter, Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh, Neil Boortz, Sean Hannity wouldn't be out there shouting it from the rooftops as conclusive irrevocable inescapable proof. Do you imagine for one second that the MSM could or would sit on this.

But nope, none of that.

Instead, five years down the road, the issue's been relegated to free thinkers like you to try and put together a case from cigarette ends and scraps of this and that.

Seriously, consider your position.

Like, no offense, but people believe all sorts of stuff. Gray Space Aliens, Men in Black, the Loch Ness Monster, Jews Controlling the World, Atlantis, the healing power of crystals, that AIDS is a government conspiracy to get rid of blacks and gays, that Kennedy was assassinated by George H.W. Bush, etc. And the thing is, you'll be amazed by how plausible they can make it sound, and how much apparent evidence they can martial to prove their case.

But that don't make none of it true. For the most part, they're all failing the basic challenges for proof, and when you look at the evidence, well, in a sense its true, but you'll generally find it hasn't properly been sifted and doesn't actually mean what they think it means.

Now, at this point in history, I regret that I got to say that what we have with Iraq wmd's and the Al Quaeda connection, is just more of same. If there was anything, it would have been out by now.

Now, I'm not saying that it's impossible that no persuasive proof will ever come out that Saddam and Osama had a partnership going. It's not impossible that Gray Space aliens will someday land on the White House Lawn and say "Sorry about all those anal probes, your anatomy is different from ours and we were looking for your brains." It's not impossible that Elvis and Andy Kaufman will stage a comeback performance. Anything is possible.

But it's been five years on now, and we're not seeing anything much. It's time to move on.

Besides which, you're not paying attention to the bigger picture.

So a high or mid level Saddamite has joined up with Zaquari's group. That has some pretty disturbing implications.

Zaquari's group for the most part wasn't much more than homicidal assholes. If they're getting Saddamites on staff, does this suggest that they're escalating their operational capacity, upgrading the general level of skill and competence. That's not good news. That could be incredibly bad news. The last thing you want with homicidal assholes is competent homicidal assholes.

Or how about this, Zaquari's group was mostly foreigners, Egyptians, Yemeni's, Saudi's, etc. They were outsiders. Perhaps for this reason, they never actually rose to much prominence in the Iraqi insurgency. It grew up all around them, but they didn't wind up running it, or even getting respected for seniority on the shop floor of terrorism.

But now, they're recruiting locally? Well, that's a disturbing development. Is the organization evolving, changing its character and composition? What does that mean, and where is it going to go?

How about this. Maybe what we are seeing is something a lot bigger. Maybe what we're seeing is connectivity.

The insurgency has been grass roots, but there's no central direction, no control, they don't even talk to each other. Everyone just minds their own business and goes out and plants a bomb. No organization, no coherence. That makes it really hard to beat. On the other hand, the failure to organize on more than the local atomic level prevents from getting it together to try and hand out major league whuppings.

So, what if this guy showing up in Zaquari's organization, and lots of other connected guys showing up elsewhere, and lots and lots of other guys making connection means that the insurgency is evolving its way up to the next level?

In a limited way, its a good thing, if they're more connected, then its easier to root them out and use those connections against it. In just about every other way, its a very very bad thing.

Y'see, one of the problems with the whole Iraqi occupation is that the guys running things for the United States have been so busy congratulating each other and jerking each other off and building castles in the sky, that they haven't bothered paying attention to what was happening on the ground. Which was why it bit them on the ass.

And to make it worse, they were all so concerned with painting a pretty picture and denying reality, that we couldn't be bothered to pay attention to what was changing and where it was going, so it kept biting us on the ass again and again and again.

So, here we are, you and I, and it's a funny old world, ennit?

I hope none of this has offended you, it weren't my intention. But I am powerfully in disagreement.

Also, Valdron, when you are going to start from the point of view that every conservative lies every time they say something than I don't know that you can have much of an open mind

When did I ever say that? Are you claiming to be a conservative? What kind of conservative are you?

What you are claiming here is special authority based on personal knowledge. This is risky. I don't know who you really are. I don't have your resume. I don't have any references. And I don't have access to your materials. You, like me, are simply words on a screen. You are judged and assessed on those words on a screen (which is all we have) and not on some greater or deeper personal credibility. When you rely on personal credentials or committment, you are always taking a risk that your words will be seen as no more serious than the guy who believes that hummingbirds are secret masters of time and space, and claims that he has access to the records of area 51 to back it up.

I don't consider myself to be a 'liberal'. I'm just a practical man. There's a lot to be said for being practical.

By the way, selectively CAPITALIZING certain WORDS is probably not a good idea, stylistically. It's one of a variety of techniques used to put emphatic spins, but it should be used sparingly.

"HELLO!" he SAID to his wife! John and SUSAN had been married for a year! She liked breakfast! He preferred little more than TOAST!"

See what I mean? Overuse actually undermines your effect and makes the reading process jarring, producing an impression that the writer's own thoughts are disjointed and disconnected.

Have a nice day.