SHORTLY BEFORE getting on a plane to fly to New Jersey from Europe in June 2000, Mohamed Atta, the lead hijacker of the first jet airliner to slam into the World Trade Center and, apparently, the lead conspirator in the attacks of September 11, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official. This was no chance encounter. Rather than take a flight from Germany, where he had been living, Atta traveled to Prague, almost certainly for the purpose of meeting there with Iraqi intelligence operative Ahmed Samir Ahani.

To understand the significance of this meeting, put yourself in the position of a terrorist. You work within a small cell of operatives; you are continually concerned about security; and you are about to launch a mission designed to bring unprecedented death and destruction to the world's most powerful country. The last thing you would do would be to meet with a foreign official--especially one from a country whose "diplomats" are presumably under close surveillance--unless the meeting were critical to your mission. In light of the otherwise sound "tradecraft" demonstrated by Atta and his confederates in the run-up to September 11, Atta would never have met with an Iraqi intelligence officer unless the Iraqi had been in some way in on the operation.

U.S. intelligence officials have responded to reports of this meeting (and others between Atta and Iraqi intelligence operatives) by denying that they provide a smoking gun tying Iraq to the attacks of September 11. That might be true by the standards of a court of law, but the United States is now engaged not in legal wrangling but in a deadly game of espionage and terrorism. In the world where we now operate, the Prague meeting is about as clear and convincing as evidence gets--especially since our intelligence service apparently has no agents-in-place of its own to tell us what was in fact going on.

This much, however, is beyond dispute: Regardless of the differences between their visions for the Middle East, Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden share an overriding objective--to expel the United States from the Middle East. Alliances have been built on less.

And there is evidence of an alliance. For example, there are numerous reports that Saddam's henchmen were reaching out to bin Laden as early as the early 1990s, when he was still operating out of Sudan and Iraq was using Khartoum as a base for its own intelligence operations after the Gulf War. We also know that high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officials have made their way to Afghanistan in recent years to meet with bin Laden and the leadership of al Qaeda. There are Iraqi defectors who claim to have seen radical Muslims at a special terrorist training site in Iraq where trainees learn, among other things, to hijack airplanes. None of this should be a surprise. Iraq can offer bin Laden money and technical expertise, and in exchange al Qaeda can provide the manpower to strike at the United States without exposing Baghdad's hand.

Then there is the matter of the refined anthrax that was used against American Media in Florida and against Congress in the letter sent to Senator Tom Daschle's office. (Both attacks, by the way, came from places visited by Mohamed Atta, New Jersey and Florida.) As Ambassador Richard Butler, former head of the United Nations weapons-inspection effort for Iraq after the Gulf War, has said, "I don't believe that the terrorist groups --al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden--could themselves make anthrax" of this quality. Iraq could. Since the defection of Hussein Kamal, Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, in 1995, we have known that Iraq retains a large biological weapons program. We know it has stockpiled mass quantities of anthrax and has worked hard to make it as potent a weapon of terror as possible.

That Iraq would have a hand in the September 11 attacks or the subsequent anthrax onslaught or both should come as no surprise. Since 1991, Saddam has been at war with the United States, and we with him. The Iraqi dictator has made it known time and again that the "mother of all battles" continues. And, like all tyrants of his maniacal stripe, he seeks not simply to hold onto power but to claim a place in history. As a result, Saddam will never relent until he has had his revenge and driven the United States from the Persian Gulf.