Totally missing my point. I never said or even thought "let OBL escape". NEVER. Only that killing/capturing him is not synonymous with victory. He has to be found, dead or alive, but just don't think that when we do find him, AQ will quit.
In truth, Iraq is an entirely separate issue as our leaders never did tell us that al-Qaeda was in Iraq...
Not true. Powell's presentation included the late Abu Zarqawi, who at the time was heading an affiliated group called Ansar al Islam in the Kurd region.
Also note that killing Zarqawi did not bring victory over Al Qaeda in Iraq. Don't misunderstand -- it has helped us get where we are now and as with OBL, I was all in favor of the Wanted Dead Or Alive policy on him, but I never thought killing him would make AQ lay down arms. And whaddaya know, I was right.
Iraq was not and is not even remotely "irrelevant". It had a long, long history of harboring and supporting Islamic terrorists, from Abu Nidal (Achille Lauro) to sending $25,000 to the parents of Palestinian suicide bombers. AQ was in Iraq before 2003 and even attending meetings with representatives of the Saddam government long before that in Sudan, brokered by Hassan al Turabi. There is also the airliner shell at Salman Pak that was used for training on taking over an airliner. There is also the fact that to this day, the Czech intel stands by its story that Mohammad Atta met with Iraq gov't reps in Prague prior to 9/11.
Saddam didn't have to be sitting at the table with OBL as they planned 9/11, he just had to be providing support for AQ of any kind at all. That, not WMD, was more than enough for me to declare war on Saddam whether he ever had WMD or not, and I think Bush made a bad decision by not emphasizing all this instead of emphasizing WMD.
But since you bring it up, it's indisputable that Saddam had WMD, and the absence of weapons was not enough. The burden was on him under the various UN resolutions to prove he had destroyed them. He refused. Instead throughout the 90's and in the run-up to the invasion, he played endless games with the inspectors, cheating and retreating. The Mossad says at least some of these weapons are in Syria. Satellite photos show a convoy of trucks going west across the Syrian border shortly before the invasion that the Mossad is convinced was carrying WMD.
Iraq, like nearly every Arab country, was also a client state of the USSR. According to Ion Mihai Pacepa, head of Caucescu's equivalent of the KGB who defected, these client states were taught a strategy called "sarindar", which means "quick exit", e.g., techniques for hiding WMD. There were various ingenious strategies for this. One great example was Libya, which managed to get one of its sites crossed off the CIA's list of potential illegal weapons manufacture. Knowing that American human intel in the region was non-existent and relied almost entirely on satellite imagery and telecom intercepts, they burned a bunch of tires in the courtyard of the site, creating the illusion that the place was on fire. As the tires burned, they painted scorch marks on the facility so after the fire was out, it would look to a satellite like the building really had burned.
It worked. Libya was taught this by Pacepa, and though he did not teach these techniques to the Iraqis himself, he says it is extremely unlikely that there were any USSR client states that weren't taught how to do this. The whole interview with Pacepa is a great read:
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={D162656E-9C26-4FF4-BE93-3C64CCC1FFCD}
Here's one of the money quotes from Pacepa:
Contemporary political memory seems to be conveniently afflicted with some kind of Alzheimer's disease. Not long ago, every Western leader, starting with President Clinton, fumed against Saddam’s WMD. Now almost no one remembers that after General Hussein Kamel, Saddam’s son-in-law, defected to Jordan in 1995, he helped us find “more than one hundred metal trunks and boxes” containing documentation “dealing with all categories of weapons, including nuclear.” He also aided UNSCOM to fish out of the Tigris River high-grade missile components prohibited to Iraq. That was exactly what my old Soviet-made “Sãrindar” plan stated he should do in case of emergency: destroy the weapons, hide the equipment, and preserve the documentation. No wonder Saddam hastened to lure Kamel back to Iraq, where three days later he was killed together with over 40 of his relatives in what the Baghdad official press described as a “spontaneous administration of tribal justice.” Once that was done, Saddam slammed the door shut to any UNSCOM inspection.
There are also vast areas of Iraq that haven't been searched, which would take years to cover even without having to fight off AQ, Saddam loyalists and Sunni and Shia militias. They found 30 Mig fighter-bombers buried in the sand west of Baghdad. (Just google "Migs in the Sand" if you don't believe me.) If they can do that, what might they have done with much smaller crates of chemical artillery rounds, etc? A lot easier to move and hide than a 60-foot long 20-foot high jets. They also discovered, per Charles Duelfer, a "just-in-time" delivery system to make bio weapons, dual use technology that could be converted almost overnight to weapons production with weapons coming off the line within 30 days of Saddam giving the order.
Last but not least, just the physical positioning of Iraq in the ME is very strategic. First, in combination with Afghanistan, it brackets Iran with two fledgling democracies, in part to serve as a morale boost for the majority of Iranians who don't exactly love their theocracy government. It sits central in the Gulf region, and controlling it means placing significant limits on the ability of our enemies to travel east-west. Most of all, as mentioned earlier, it takes away a base, bank, armory and training ground from Islamist terror orgs. So, no, Iraq was not and is not "irrelevant".