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OSAMA AND SADDAM....The continuing FUD campaign over Iraq's ties to al-Qaeda is endlessly frustrating — and, frankly, probably not an argument that's winnable for liberals. There's just enough uncertainty about the whole thing that war opponents will never be able to produce a firm smoking gun showing that the administration is lying.

But let's review the primary evidence anyway....

What's In a Name?

And in the clutching at straws department...

You've probably heard about the latest Iraq-al Qaeda link, which has had the right-wing press in an uproar for the past few days. The connection supposedly was unearthed earlier this year by a poly sci professor moonlighting as a Pentagon intelligence analyst (do you think I could make something like that up?) It consists of a name - Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, or, variously, Hikmat Shakir Ahmad - that the professor, one Christopher Carney, found on a list of officers in the Saddam Fedayeen - the Iraqi dictator's personal militia, whose members were blown away in vast numbers by the U.S. Army during last year's invasion.

It seems Shakir's (or Ahmad's) name is really similar to that of a former Malaysian Airlines employee, Ahmad Hikmat Shakir Azzawi, who allegedly served as a "greeter" for a group of al Qaeda operatives when they arrived in Kuala Lumpur for a 2000 planning conference.

(I can just see Azzawi standing in the main concourse at the Kuala Lumpur airport with the rest of the limo drivers, holding up a little cardboard sign that says "al Qaeda planning meeting.")

Anyway, with that stunning perceptual insight which allows a neocon to see connections not visible to full-time, professional intelligence analysts, Carney realized the similarity in names almost certainly meant that Saddam's Hikmat and Bin Ladin's Hikmat were actually one and the same guys!

True, the name on the Fedayeen list was not spelled exactly the same way Carney had seen it spelled on other Iraqi documents, but, as Weekly Standard columnist and conspiracy theorist Steven Hayes later wrote, "such discrepancies are common." The true neocon understands that these inconsistencies and contradictions are only minor distractions that should be allowed to obscure the broad pattern - which the initiated can always find in the data....