One idee fixe of the Left, presented not only without evidence, but in the face of established fact, is that Saddam Hussein would never have cooperated with religious zealots like Bin Laden because of ideology.
In my copious free time, I've been reading Paul Johnson's magisterial Modern Times, which contains some fascinating echo for our own time on just about every page. The Versailles Treaty imposed severe military restrictions on Germany, which the Prussian-led military worked hard - through several constitutions - to evade. Including the following:
The help [by Germany to Bolshevik Russia] took the immediate form of Freikorps officers, munitions and in due course, industrial expertise in building new war factories. The last point was vital to the Germans, who under the Versailles Treaty had to dismantle their armaments industry. By secretly coaching the Bolsheviks in arms technology and developing new weapons in Russia they were maintaining a continuity of skills which, when the time was ripe, could onve more be openly exploited back at home. Thus a strange, covert alliance was formed, which occasionally broke surface...a working relationship of generals, arms experts, later of secret police, which was to continue in one form or another until 22 June 1941...The deeper irony is that this was a marriage of class enemies: what could be further apart than Prussian generals and Bolsheviks? Yet in the final crisis and aftermath of the war, both groups saw themselves, and certainly were seen, as outlaws. There was a spirit of gangster fraternization in their arrangements...
Of course, the 9/11 Committee found exactly such a relationship, and the Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes has been documenting it for years. Now, it appears that the religious zealots running Iran have been cooperating with the self-consciously godless Communists running North Korea.
So now, there's a Spectrum of Fraternization, where entites that are really far apart, like Iran and North Korea, can cooperate, and entities that are really close together, like Iran and Al Qaeda, can cooperate, but somewhere in-between, corresponding exactly to whatever foreign policy threat we're facing at the moment, is a zone of non-cooperation.
Makes you kind of question the whole thesis, doesn't it?
