Those same people wrongly claim terrorists weren't in Iraq until after we invaded, thus making the terrorism problem worse.
I've already mentioned how terrorists are getting waxed inside Iraq today.
Now we can see more evidence of how that good old secular Saddam used terrorism as a tool of the state:
THE FORMER IRAQI REGIME OF Saddam Hussein trained thousands of radical Islamic terrorists from the region at camps in Iraq over the four years immediately preceding the U.S. invasion, according to documents and photographs recovered by the U.S. military in postwar Iraq. The existence and character of these documents has been confirmed to THE WEEKLY STANDARD by eleven U.S. government officials.
The secret training took place primarily at three camps--in Samarra, Ramadi, and Salman Pak--and was directed by elite Iraqi military units. Interviews by U.S. government interrogators with Iraqi regime officials and military leaders corroborate the documentary evidence. Many of the fighters were drawn from terrorist groups in northern Africa with close ties to al Qaeda, chief among them Algeria's GSPC and the Sudanese Islamic Army. Some 2,000 terrorists were trained at these Iraqi camps each year from 1999 to 2002, putting the total number at or above 8,000. Intelligence officials believe that some of these terrorists returned to Iraq and are responsible for attacks against Americans and Iraqis.
The difference between pre-2003 and post-2003 is, of course, that in the 1999 to 2002 period, there was very little attrition of the terrrorists. Two-thousand came in and 2,000 went out with the ol' Baghdad U diploma--minus the odd student who blew himself up in Remedial IED 101.
Ending the Saddam and Taliban regimes went a long way toward depriving terrorist groups their trained terrorists. I don't deny that surviving a year in Iraq might be outstanding terrorist training. But surviving that year ain't all that easy folks.
I look forward to more information coming out of the Iraqi files we still sift and translate.
