Was Saddam Hussein cooperating with Al-Qaeda during the Iraq war?

Answer 1

Saddam Hussein was actually ideologically opposed to everything Al-Qaeda stood for. He never desired or cared for religion, let alone religious politics or Islamism. Saddam Hussein was an ardent Nationalist Secularist and opposed the Internationalist Islamist agenda of Al-Qaeda. Both are notably violent philosophies and both are in the Islamic World, but that is where the similarity ends. Both people/organizations had a fundamentally different view of the world and therefore were not aligned. He did not like the idea of having to give control to small cells that he could not control directly, and he did not like the idea of directly antagonizing the West. (Many of the things he did antagonized the West, but he did not do those things desiring confrontation.) Saddam Hussein's goal was regional supremacy and had no interest in the worldwide regime change advocated by Al-Qaeda.

The only reason a relationship developed between Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda after the start of the war is that it quickly became clear that the Iraqi Army could not hold back the American Army and that a guerilla war would be the only viable resistance to foreign occupation. Since Al-Qaeda excels at that type of warfare, he extended an invitation for them to come in, but this occurred only AFTER the Iraq War began.