Although The Washington Post the next day buried it on Page 17 (and Newsweek may construe as bogus any Saddam-Osama connection) the messages' authenticity was best attested by the amazed U.S. official who told Reuters, "We couldn't make this up if we tried".
But she has been impressed by a fresh Anglo-American commitment to put the UN in charge of any post-Saddam reconstruction.
After a decade of opposing any pressure on Saddam to obey U.N. resolutions, France reversed itself after its favorite dictator was brought down.
"They removed any mention of the Saddam era in the history books, but the result has been that these books became worse than before," said Mohammed Kamil, the chairman of the history department at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad.
Any objections from France and Russia, Saddam's major oil-trading partners, would be assuaged, a senior I.N.C. official told me, by assurances that they would be given access to the extraordinarily rich oil fields in southern Iraq.
The inspectors themselves believed at that time that large caches of weapons materials remained to be found.Meanwhile the containment operation, a combination of no-fly-zones, bombings and UN sanctions, was producing misery and grievances without making Saddam feel any more trustworthy.
The cost of displacing Saddam was, in any case, far too high in blood and treasure.
Well, a great many more would have died from sanctions and from Saddam than from any intervention.
But still no-one, not the inspectors nor any member of the security council, not any half-way rational observer, believes Saddam is cooperating fully or unconditionally or immediately.
