After an unconscionable delay, the US authorities have finally started to make available for public inspection some of the thousands of previously classified documents from the Saddam Hussein era which were captured after the fall of Baghdad. Some have been posted up on the Foreign Military Studies website. Needless to say, this is being ignored by the mainstream media but the blogosphere has been getting to work. Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard, who has consistently produced evidence of Saddam’s connections with terrorism and al Qaeda, now reports:

Saddam Hussein’s regime provided financial support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support- - temporarily, it seems -- after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group...

These documents add to the growing body of evidence confirming the Iraqi regime's longtime support for terrorism abroad. The first of them, a series of memos from the spring of 2001, shows that the Iraqi Intelligence Service funded Abu Sayyaf, despite the reservations of some IIS officials. The second, an internal Iraqi Intelligence memo on the relationships between the IIS and Saudi opposition groups, records that Osama bin Laden requested Iraqi cooperation on terrorism and propaganda and that in January 1997 the Iraqi regime was eager to continue its relationship with bin Laden. The third, a September 15, 2001, report from an Iraqi Intelligence source in Afghanistan, contains speculation about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda and the likely U.S. response to it.

In addition, an article in Foreign Affairs, based on declassified documents and interviews with Iraqi officials, also contains the following notable passage:

The Saddam Fedayeen also took part in the regime's domestic terrorism operations and planned for attacks throughout Europe and the Middle East. In a document dated May 1999, Saddam's older son, Uday, ordered preparations for ‘special operations, assassinations, and bombings, for the centers and traitor symbols in London, Iran and the self-ruled areas [Kurdistan].’ Preparations for ‘Blessed July,’ a regime-directed wave of ‘martyrdom’ operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

There were three interlinked reasons why the US and British governments – along with every other western country at the time – considered Saddam Husein to be such a menace to the west. They were his sponsorship of terrorism, his pursuit of WMD and his aim to become the leader of the Arab world. In Britain the anti-war crowd – now in hysterical overdrive over the continuing war in Iraq – now flatly deny that Saddam was involved in global terror and that he posed any threat to the west at all. The claim that he was in bed with al Qaeda is laughed to scorn. The documents reported by Stephen Hayes show once again that this relationship was not a figment of a crazed neocon imagination; and as the Foreign Affairs paragraph tells us: Preparations for ‘Blessed July,’ a regime-directed wave of ‘martyrdom’ operations against targets in the West, were well under way at the time of the coalition invasion.

Whatever the horrors now engulfing Iraq and whatever mistakes were made since the fall of Baghdad, the fact remains that the toppling of Saddam was a necessity for the west. Just because things are bad does not mean they could not have been worse. This simple fact has been all but obliterated from public discourse by the avalanche of lies and distortions from the anti-war crowd who have rewritten both history and present circumstances in order to say ‘I told you so’. The pathological hysteria with which they are doing so, however (see today’s Independent newspaper, for example) suggests that at some level they know they are denying this patently obvious truth.