I continue to insist the same, and calling it “old news” is not an argument. Neither is discounting terror connections on the grounds that other nations have them, too. Neither is saying “Why don’t we just nuke everybody?”

ChrisO: Do you know what a diplomatic passport is? You can’t go down and pick one up at the Post Office. A diplomatic passport identifies you as a diplomatic agent of a recognized country, entitled to diplomatic immunity.

Finally, it’s ridiculous for anyone to claim to know what Abu Nidal did while he was in Iraq, and it’s equally ridiculous to claim to know with certainty that Iraq’s known communications with Al Qaeda had nothing to do with terrorism, or that other contacts existed that we don’t know about.

You get to say, “Nobody can prove Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein planned a terrorist attack.” You don’t get to play omniscient God and absolve him.

Granted he was horrible to the Kurds…but just look at Rwanda and Darfur. Death tolls and other horrific atrocities in either place blow away everything that happened associated with Saddam, often by several orders of magnitude.

Saddam was at least an 8, and rising.

Of course Saddam was a bad man, who had killed lots of people in his country, and made inflammatory remarks about Israel. But I’d say he was at best a 4 or 5 on the scale of international bad guys where Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin rate a 10. All you have to do is look at any of a dozen countries in Africa to find far worse regular atrocities than Saddam ever perpetrated – but there’s no oil in most of those areas, and they didn’t piss off cowboy Bush so we ignore them.

If that’s your standard we should topple every single Arab regime that supports the Palestinians or hates Israel — in other words, all of them.

Abu Abbas was a member of the Palestine Liberation Front. Not Al Qaeda. Saddam had been sheltering him (and keeping him inactive, BTW) since the mid-1980s.

Abu Nidal, likewise, was a Palestinian militant. Not Al Qaeda. He was a paranoid psychotic and a very bad man. But he only came to Iraq in 1999 after being expelled from Libya, and Saddam had him axed in 2002. While in Iraq he was not active as a terrorist.

Abu Nidal did his worst work while sheltered by Libya. I notice Libya hasn’t been invaded. In fact, we’re currently seeking to improve relations with Ghaddafi.

Serving as a Palestinian terrorist retirement home is also not the sort of “state support for terror” we had in mind after 9/11. That might be why those connections were not seriously cited as a major reason to invade Iraq.

Abu Abbas, the Achille Lauro hijacker, was released by the Italians because he held a valid Iraqi diplomatic passort. Abu Nidal was harbored by Saddam for three years before his apparent murder.

But there’s no arguing logic with the left on this. They are committed emotionally to “Saddam Hussein had no ties to terrorism” and they will go to their graves believing it.

Now, whether Iraq was the right target, given that there are several state sponsors of terror, I leave to others…