Four months after the start of the Iraq war, two former senior Clinton administration national security officials took to the pages of the New York Times to demand accountability for the Bush administration's claims about Iraq and terrorism. Or, as they put it in their opening sentence, "Iraq's supposed links to terrorists."

Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon wrote that the Bush administration's assertions about Iraqi support for terrorism were "suspect" and demanded scrutiny. One sure way to know the truth about Iraq and terrorism, they argued, was to consult the mountain of evidence the regime left behind as its leaders fled in front of American forces. "Military and intelligence officials need only comb through the files of Iraq's intelligence agency and a handful of other government ministries," and we would have our answers.

Well, we have our answers. They came in the 1,600-page Pentagon study released on March 13 and entitled Iraqi Perspectives Project, Saddam and Terrorism: Emerging Insights from Captured Iraqi Documents, produced after a review of some 600,000 documents unearthed in postwar Iraq. And it is a devastating indictment of the U.S. intelligence community's analysis of Iraq, the Clinton administration's counterterrorism policy, and the arguments of anyone who would use the word "supposed" to describe Iraq's links to terrorists.

A thorough examination of those flawed analyses and the policies that resulted from them is as important now as it was when Benjamin and Simon called for it in the summer of 2003. "This is not only a question of political accountability--it also bears on our nation's fundamental approach to security," they wrote. On that, at least, they were right.

Benjamin laid out his views in the 2003 article he coauthored with Simon and in another one he wrote by himself in the fall of 2002, also published in the New York Times. The Clinton administration itself was of two minds on Iraqi support for terrorism. Sometimes Clinton officials argued that Iraq and al Qaeda were in league, as they did in justifying U.S. airstrikes on the al Shifa pharmaceutical plant in August 1998 and in issuing a formal indictment of Osama bin Laden. But since George W. Bush took office, and particularly since 9/11, former Clinton officials have largely disowned these claims, pretending that they never made such arguments and lashing out at anyone who reminded them that they did.

There are few more succinct distillations of the Clinton administration's view of Iraq and terrorism than these two articles. It will take years before we understand the full scope of Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism and the U.S. government's response to it under Bill Clinton. For the time being, it is useful to contrast the views offered by these top Clinton administration national security officials with the findings of the military historians who authored the Iraqi Perspectives Project (IPP) report, as well as with the actual words of the former Iraqi regime.

"Attacking Iraq would not be a continuation of the war against terror but a deviation from it." Benjamin, September 30, 2002