For those who would insist—out of both ideological and (subsequently) narrative necessity—that Iraq’s oblique, secular-Baathist relationship with the fundamentalist regime of al Qaeda (a characterization that relies on the carefully-worded dodge that the Hussein’s regime showed “no evidence of operational ties” to bin Laden’s group [see the 911 Commission Report], a formulation that means, simply, that none of any number of potentially developed and financed plans were ever provably completed), the dogged nature of Stephen Hayes’ reporting on the matter, which has lately been buttressed by more and more (still unnamed, admittedly, sources inside the intelligence services), has become more than simply a nuisance.  Instead, it is like a particularly tenacious pimple on the established face of the left’s (and the paleocon right’s) Iraq war narrative, one that threatens to rear its pusfilled white head at any time, most dangerously, right before the 2006 electoral prom.

From the WSJ:

It is almost an article of religious faith among opponents of the Iraq War that Iraq became a terrorist destination only after the U.S. toppled Saddam Hussein. But what if that’s false, and documents from Saddam’s own regime show that his government trained thousands of Islamic terrorists at camps inside Iraq before the war?

Sounds like news to us, and that’s exactly what is reported this week by Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard magazine. Yet the rest of the press has ignored the story, and for that matter the Bush Administration has also been dumb. The explanation for the latter may be that Mr. Hayes also scores the Administration for failing to do more to translate and analyze the trove of documents it’s collected from the Saddam era.

Mr. Hayes reports that, from 1999 through 2002, “elite Iraqi military units” trained roughly 8,000 terrorists at three different camps—in Samarra and Ramadi in the Sunni Triangle, as well as at Salman Pak, where American forces in 2003 found the fuselage of an aircraft that might have been used for training. Many of the trainees were drawn from North African terror groups with close ties to al Qaeda, including Algeria’s GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Mr. Hayes writes that he had no fewer than 11 corroborating sources, and yesterday he told us he’d added several more since publication.

All of this is of more than historical interest, since Americans are still dying in Iraq at the hands of an enemy it behooves us to understand. If Saddam did train terrorists in Iraq before the war, then many of them must still be fighting there and the current “insurgency” can hardly be called a popular uprising rooted in Sunni nationalism. Instead, it is a revanchist operation led by Saddam’s apparat and those they trained to use terror to achieve their political goals.

This means in turn that much of the Sunni population might be willing to participate in Free Iraq’s politics but is intimidated from doing so by these Saddamists. The recent spurt of suicide bombings, aimed at Iraqi civilians and police trainees, looks like an attempt to revive such intimidation after the successful election. These Saddamists can’t be coaxed into surrender by political blandishments because their goal isn’t to share power but is to dominate Iraq once again. Or if they do play in the political process, it will only be in the Sinn Fein sense of doing so as cover for their real terror strategy.

In any case, it is passing strange that the Bush Administration has been so uninterested in translating, and assessing, the information in the two million documents, audio and videotapes and computer hard drives it has collected in Iraq. Mr. Hayes reports that only 50,000 of these “exploitable items” have been examined so far, and those by a skeleton crew with few resources. Does anyone think, had there been a Nazi insurgency after Hitler fell, that the U.S. wouldn’t have scoured everything found in Berlin? Why the dereliction this time?

A benign explanation is that the first Bush priority was searching Saddam’s files for WMD, not terror ties. But the WMD work has been done since the Duelfer report was substantially wrapped up well over a year ago. The current threat to U.S. soldiers in Iraq is from terror attacks, not WMD. Anything the U.S. can discover about whether and how Saddam and his coterie planned a guerrilla war before the invasion could be invaluable in defeating this enemy.

In his new memoir about his year in Iraq, L. Paul Bremer reports that in July of 2003 he was told about a captured document from Saddam’s intelligence service (dated January 2003) outlining a “strategy of organized resistance” if the regime fell. About the same time, pamphlets began circulating in Baghdad describing the “Party of Return,” with vows to kill Iraqis who worked with the Coalition. We also know that documents discovered with Saddam in his rabbit hole in late 2003 included a claim that the insurgents would know they had won when a U.S. Presidential candidate called for withdrawing American troops from Iraq. These are signs of a disciplined political party, not some broad Algerian-like nationalism.

A less benign explanation for the Bush Administration’s lethargy is that its officials don’t want to challenge the prewar CIA orthodoxy that the “secular” Saddam would never cavort with “religious” al Qaeda. They’ve seen what happened to others—”Scooter” Libby, Douglas Feith, John Bolton—who dared to question CIA analyses. Mr. Hayes reports that the Pentagon intelligence chief, Stephen Cambone, has been a particular obstacle to energetic document inspection [ed’s note – this same concern seems curiously understated with respect to Syria and aid to Islamists flocking to the Iraqi jihad].

But if we’ve learned nothing else about U.S. intelligence in the last four years, it is that its “consensus” views are often wrong. The 9/11 Commission has confirmed extensive communication between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda over the years, including sanctuary for the current insurgent leader in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. We have also learned that in the years leading up to his ouster Saddam had implemented a “faith campaign” to use fundamentalist Islam as a tool of internal control. Especially if U.S. troops are going to remain to help the new Iraq government defeat the terrorists, we should want to know everything we can about them.

And the American people should know too. For three years now, opponents of the war in Congress and the bureaucracy have cherry-picked intelligence details and leaked them to influence public opinion. The Bush Administration until recently has been remarkably reluctant to fight back. Telling truths about Saddam that are revealed by his own documents is part of that fight.

[My emphasis]

The sheer number of captured documents is of course overwhelming for a beleaguered (and understaffed) collection of bureaucrats charged with disentangling this morass of paperwork, most of it in a language unfamiliar to them.

But this is no excuse.  Perhaps its time for the US Goverment (as per the suggestions of those like Stanley Kurtz and Martin Kramer) to provide additional federal largesse on MESA programs that produce, in an expedited manner, scholars capable of translating and collating the documents.  Hell, even a volunteer program—one that offers training in reading and translating Arabic—would be a useful start.

History will tell us, ultimately, what those documents contained—and whether or not any of the information (the majority of which, we must assume, is but workaday paperwork from a foreign government bureaucracy) supported many of the contentions made by the more solicitous members of the world’s foreign intelligence establishments.

Hopefully, this process will reach a degree of usefulness before the anti-war narrative—already so successful at reducing the casus belli to WMD (despite the number of other pressing reasons outlined in the resolution for use of force)—becomes the “truth” against all other competing narratives must wage battle from the disadvantageous position of “pro-Bush conspiracy theories.”

(h/t Terry Hastings; my earlier comments on Hayes’ piece here)