The USA did not support the ideology of the Soviet Union yet we still backed them up during WW2. Our common enemy was the Nazis. The same can be applied to Saddam.
That makes little rational sense. So Saddam was a common enemy? With whom? Well there was one in fact; Iran and quite possibly Al Quaeda (Saddam was not religious enough for them, he was an old-school power crazed Arab nationalist) Now he's been removed, Iraq is now[i/] at long last, a porous base for Islamic extremists.
Saddams common enemy with Al Qaeda was of course the United states. It doesn't take much thought depth to figure THAT out. But of course I forget, most leftists don't like to deal with little things called "facts".
We do, but there's reading facts, and then there's analysing them. We prefer to do the latter.
Unlike the right, we also read between the lines and don't take everything at frigging face value.
Saddam and Al Qaeda hated each other due to Saddam's staunchly secular policies (which, lest we forget, partly caused the war in Iran and made him a "useful ally" in the 80s, just the same way the secular regimes in Egypt and Uzbekistan are now), so there's no way they would have worked together.
To back this up:
"Hamid Mir, bin Laden's Pakistani biographer, spoke to him in 1997: He condemned Saddam Hussein in my interview.
He gave such kind of abuses that it was very difficult for me to write, [calling Hussein a] socialist motherf****er. [He said], "The land of the Arab world, the land is like a mother, and Saddam Hussein is f****ing his mother." He also explained that Saddam Hussein is against us, and he discourages Iraqi boys to come to Afghanistan.In February 2003, on the eve of the Iraq war, bin Laden released an audiotape in which he said, "Needless to say, this crusade war is primarily targeted against the people of Islam.
Regardless of the removal or the survival of the socialist [Ba'th] party or Saddam, Muslims in general and the Iraqis in particular must brace themselves for jihad." Bin Laden went on to observe that "socialists are infidels," implying that Saddam was an apostate from Islam, the gravest charge bin Laden could make against a fellow Muslim."http://www.peterbergen.com/bergen/articles/details.aspx?id=233I think Michael means that by saying Al-Qaida and Saddam were "no friends."
