Picking up a gauntlet

In an interesting colloquium of sorts over at Slate.com - Liberal Hawks Reconsider the Iraq War - Fred Kaplan insinuates a "gotcha" question: if, as this story avers, documents found on Saddam's person at his time of capture indicate that he cautioned his fellow-insurrectionists against working with "foreign jihadists," doesn't that invalidate the pre-war concern that Saddam would've made common-cause with those types and, say, provided them with WMD-related materiel?

In a word: No.

The context makes for the decisive difference. Pre-war, after all, Saddam was the potentate of Iraq. As such, he was in a position to "manage" any cooperation he might undertake with foreign agents/proxies. It's easy to imagine scenarios under which such cross-pollination could be undertaken without any threat to his rule (e.g., the possibly apocryphal tale of a meeting in Prague between Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent). Under the conditions of a quasi-"stable" rule, Saddam could set the terms of any alliances.

With Saddam dethroned, on the run and the conditions of his "counter-insurgency" fragile (to say the least), it would've been folly indeed to cooperate readily with foreign Islamist types. Together, they might win battles - but Saddam would surely stand to lose "the war." Under the changed conditions, they wouldn't have evidently similar longer-term interests: Saddam's interest, to the extent that he was a "rational" actor, would be somehow to restore himself to power, not provide a leg up for the true-believing jihadists.

The moral: as conditions change, so will the desirability of specific alliances .