Bill Clinton spent a lot of time in the interview with Chris Wallace touting Richard Clarke as the terrorism guru. If we’re to take Richard Clarke at his word, then we should probably also believe him when he made the Iraq/al-Qaida connection, in defense of Bill Clinton’s bombing of the pharamceutical plant in Khartoum:

Clarke did provide new information in defense of Clinton’s decision to fire Tomahawk cruise missiles at the El Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum, Sudan, in retaliation for bin Laden’s role in the Aug. 7 embassy bombings.

While U.S. intelligence officials disclosed shortly after the missile attack that they had obtained a soil sample from the El Shifa site that contained a precursor of VX nerve gas, Clarke said that the U.S. government is “sure” that Iraqi nerve gas experts actually produced a powdered VX-like substance at the plant that, when mixed with bleach and water, would have become fully active VX nerve gas.

Clarke said U.S. intelligence does not know how much of the substance was produced at El Shifa or what happened to it. But he said that intelligence exists linking bin Laden to El Shifa’s current and past operators, the Iraqi nerve gas experts and the National Islamic Front in Sudan.

Given the evidence presented to the White House before the airstrike, Clarke said, the president “would have been derelict in his duties if he didn’t blow up the facility.”

If we’re to believe everything Richard Clarke says with respect to terrorism, then we must believe that a link existed in 1999 between Iraq and al-Qaida.

Is Bill Clinton ready to make that assertion and provide a significant justification to the war in Iraq?

What do you think?