In April 1991, while Operation Desert Storm was cleaning up, the Popular Arab and Islamic Conference, the so-called "Terrorist International", met in Khartoum, Sudan, for the first time. Present were Bin Ladin, Zawahiri and both Iraq and Iranian representatives of the Islamist revolutionaries. Sudan's Hasan al-Turabi, host to that and subsequent Conference meetings, spent the next two years and finally obtained a rapprochement between Iraq and Iran. The two nations worked together, and along with Bin Ladin, succeeded in destroying Yemini rebels and successfully concluded the civil war in Yemen. Next, they worked together in Somalia. And they worked together in the Balkans.
For anyone to claim that Al Qaida and Iraq did not have a longstanding relationship is crazy, and if Bush could only depend on the weak-kneed State Department a White Paper would already be issued on the subject.
As for Congress, it was first warned by a sub-committee on Terrorism in a late 1992 report that Iraq was involved up to its eyeballs in supporting terrorist organizations. To conclude, Democrats hate Bush so much that they refuse to review the evidence on Iraq. They do themselves no credit, and they do great harm to this nation.