No Iraqi Smoking Gun

Intelligence gathering has few “Eureka!” moments in which a malefactor is discovered gripping a smoking gun. Since 9/11, intelligence agencies have looked in vain for a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda’s attacks on New York and the Pentagon. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld says the failure to find a connection does not mean it does not exist (in his words, the “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”), but the passage of time makes the discovery of any connection less likely.

There may have been contacts and conversations between Osama bin Laden’s terrorist group and the Baghdad regime after 9/11, but so far the attacks themselves appear to be solely an Al Qaeda operation. An informant for the Czech counterintelligence service claimed that hijack leader Mohamed Atta met with an Iraqi intelligence official in Prague, according to a report publicized by the Czech interior minister. But that claim has been widely doubted by many officials, Czech and foreign, and no significant new evidence is publicly known. FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III said last April that his agency “ran down literally hundreds of thousands of leads” in seeking evidence to support the report and came up empty.

The Bush administration should ensure that its requests for the CIA and other agencies to hunt for links between Bin Laden and Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein are not interpreted as pressure to provide evidence that does not exist. Intelligence and congressional sources told Times reporters last month that senior Bush administration officials were pressuring CIA analysts to tailor their assessments of the Iraqi threat to help build a case against Hussein.

A French judge who has spent two decades fighting Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorists flatly declared, “We have found no evidence of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda.” Yet Rumsfeld says there is “bulletproof” evidence that Al Qaeda members have been in Iraq recently and for years have had contacts with Hussein’s regime. President Bush said of Hussein this month, “We know he’s got ties with Al Qaeda.” European intelligence officials say that’s doubtful, since Hussein has gone out of his way to run a secular regime of the kind that’s poison to Bin Laden. Hussein and Al Qaeda share a mutual hatred of America, but so far as is known the Iraqi dictator has not provided weapons to terrorists.

Iraq has left a long trail of bad deeds: invasions of Iran and Kuwait, use of poison gas against its own citizens, attempts to shoot down U.N.-authorized overflights that monitor compliance with Security Council resolutions. These are all good arguments for the tough stance the U.N. Security Council adopted Friday on inspecting Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Charges of Iraqi ties to 9/11, without believable evidence, merely undercut Bush’s case for military action.