The connection

“We will fight this war against terror until it is won,” said President Bush, in a speech last fall. “We are fighting on many fronts. Iraq is now the central front.”That claim elicited howls of derision from those, like presidential candidate Howard Dean, who opposed the Iraq War. Even those Democrats who supported the war warned that it could distract from the proper focus of the War on Terror: al Qaeda.These arguments, certain to be at the center of the national security debates leading up to the 2004 presidential election, share one assumption: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden did not - and would never - work together.Welcome to the new conventional wisdom. But that conventional wisdom is wrong.Drawing on top-secret intelligence documents and interviews with high-ranking Bush and Clinton Administration officials, “The Connection” will dispute the all-too-comfortable notion that these two terror masters waged separate wars against America. It will also examine why politicians, journalists, and intelligence experts, in the face of mounting evidence of a Saddam-bin Laden collaboration, have shown themselves to be dangerously incurious.