Twice in recent days, articles in the Washington Post have suggested that Bush Administration officials claimed before the Iraq War that Iraq and al Qaeda had an “operational relationship.” Last week, Karen DeYoung made the accusation directly when she wrote: “An examination of more than 600,000 Iraqi documents, audio and video records collected by U.S. forces since the March 2003 invasion has concluded that there is ‘no smoking gun’ supporting the Bush administration’s prewar assertion of an ‘operational relationship’ between Saddam Hussein and the al-Qaeda terrorist network, sources familiar with the study said.” And today, Peter Baker and Josh Paltrow wrote: “The vice president used the opportunity to reassert that there was ‘a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda’ before the U.S. invasion, despite reports that have found no operational ties between the two.” (When did the Bush Administration claim that Iraq had an “operational relationship” with al Qaeda before the war? It may have happened, but I missed it if it did. The closest I’ve seen to such an assertion came when a State Department official named Matthew Daley gave testimony to a congressional committee shortly after the war began in which he worried about an “operational relationship” between Iraq and Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda affiliate in the Philippines. My recollection is that Bush Administration officials pretty consistently made the argument that waiting for an “operational relationship” to develop would be imprudent, hence the need to preempt that threat.) Let me make a more basic point. A relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda need not have been “operational” to have warranted military action to eliminate it. The Clinton Administration, for example, argued repeatedly that Iraq supplied assistance to al Qaeda on chemical weapons. Such as relationship, if that’s as far as it went, would not have qualified as “operational,” but certainly would have been — and was — cause for tremendous concern. But “no operational relationship” seems to be the new media-invented standard. This is from the Post piece that ran today: