There really is an effort underway on the right to revive the notion of an Iraq connection to 9/11. I wrote yesterday about the excerpt in The Weekly Standard from Stephen Hayes's book The Connection (subtitle: How al Qaeda's Collaboration with Saddam Hussein Has Endangered America); here's Jay Bryant at TownHall.com writing "Time to Tell All About Iraq and al-Qaeda," and here, at great length, is a National Review article by Andrew McCarthy, which cites quite a bit of writing by Edward Jay Epstein. This stuff may be on the verge of crossing back over to the mainstream. Get ready.

There's a pretty good refutation of all this in a Slate discussion between Epstein and Daniel Benjamin, the National Security Council's counterterrorism director in the Clinton years and coauthor of The Age of Sacred Terror. The discussion is here, here, and here.

What's curious is that Benjamin's comments still hold up rather well, even though the discussion took place in March and April of '93. His point is that there really might have been contact here and there between Iraq and al-Qaeda, but that's not necessarily an indication of collaboration:

...after the bombing of the two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Dick Clarke insisted that we conduct a review of the intelligence involving al-Qaida, Iraq, and Iran to see if the CIA was missing something regarding state sponsorship of Bin Laden's organization. Interestingly, the connections to Iran were more numerous. But in both countries, we saw that there had been cases of operatives transiting through these countries, sometimes even living for a time in them, and there were indications of passing contacts with Iranian or Iraqi officials. Still, we could not find anything that hinted at broader cooperation....

Even if an Iraqi intelligence agent met with Mohamed Atta in Prague, it would be interesting and worrisome but not decisive.... There may have been Iraqi spies within al-Qaida, keeping an eye on the group. There were likely individuals who worked for Baghdad and then joined up with Bin Laden. The point is that establishing a real relationship in which the two sides were working on joint projects for common goals requires a lot more...

And the believers don't have a lot more, even now. They have hints (and not much more) that Iraqis and jihadists were in each other's presence but not that they were working together. Benjamin thought there would have been a lot more, even before the war, if Saddam and al-Qaeda were partners:

...it is very difficult to hide serious ties between a government and a terrorist group. We have a hard time spying on terrorist organizations, but governments, which have buildings with telephones and faxes and employees who will trade information for money, are easier to keep an eye on. When terrorist groups and governments work together, they negotiate over targets, finances, materiel, and tactics. That affords plenty of opportunity for detection. My judgment that we would have seen more evidence of cooperation is based on the pretty extensive trail left by state sponsors, including the Iraqis, working with other terrorist groups. Given this empirical record, we would need some explanation for why there is no analogous record regarding al-Qaida and Iraq.

We have the run of Iraq now, and we still need an explanation for that from the believers.

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Incidentally, in a post yesterday I described a reader who got me thinking about all this as "a right-winger, I think." He assures me he isn't. My apologies.