Juan Cole finds that Ireland on line found something really important in the huge pile of captured Iraqi documents released by the Bush administration.

Saddam Was Trying to Capture Zarqawi

The Bush administration repeatedly made the presence in Iraq of Abu Musab Zarqawi a pretext for invading the country and overthrowing Saddam Hussein. They implied that he was a client of Saddam and that Saddam had arranged for hospital care for him.

Newly released documents from the captured Iraqi archives show that Saddam had put out an APB for Zarqawi and was trying to have him arrested as a danger to the Baath regime!

' However, one of the documents, a letter from an Iraqi intelligence official, dated August 17, 2002, asked agents in the country to be on the lookout for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and another unnamed man whose picture was attached. '

Thus the last alleged operational link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda has been proven to be a fraud. Zarqawi may have spent time in Ba'athist controlled Iraq just as he certainly spent years in US occupied Iraq and now is in US assisted in-transition-to-democracy-or-civil-war-or-both Iraq. They were trying to track him down too.