The Iraq/al Quaeda Connection Again.

Andrew McCarthy at NRO adumbrates the many, many connections between Saddam and bin Laden's organization.

Must these links be proven to an ontological certainty?

I don't think so. Why would it be unreasonable to believe that Saddam wouldn't leverage his control over sovereign territory to make an alliance with another opponent of the United States? It's not like that kind of thing hasn't happened before.

And spare us the nonsense about the ideological differences between Saddam and bin Laden. This isn't the debating room at the MoveOn home offices. History is replete with antithetical ideologies putting off the final accounting of their differences to make common cause against a mutual enemy. Think of the anarchists and the Communists during Spain's Civil War or the British and the Bolsheviks during World War II.

Moreover, the burden that American leaders have of protecting American security means we deserve the benefit of the doubt, not psychotic leaders of states with a track record of mass murder. I'll say it again, the logic of proof in the law permits you to believe the affirmative of a proposition if you disbelieve the other's guys denial. [See this post on Donchin v. Guerrero and the proof of the existence of WMD.] In other words, in a world of uncertainty, if the other guy tells you he didn't know that his tenant had a dog, and you have reason to believe he's lying, you can conclude that he knew that the tenant had a dog and moreover that he knew the dog had a habit of biting people. After all, if that wasn't the case, why would he be making all that effort to lie?

I take it that the logic of this approach applies with even more force to situations involving psychotics with a proclivity for mass murder and the potential for putting their sick fantasies into execution.