RALEIGH — Remember the Saturday morning TV show Schoolhouse Rock? Some cool jazz musicians got together with the ABC television network to craft catchy tunes and clever animations that actually taught young people important things. The best short feature in the series was “How a Bill Becomes Law,” featuring the immortal opening phrase: “I’m just a bill/yes, I’m only a bill/And I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill. . .”

It was likely the extent of civics education received by many a 1970s and 1980s student (and just about adequate, too, if viewed with its natural companion, the Simpsons parody “I’m an amendment to be, yes, an amendment to be, and I’m hopin’ that they’ll ratify me.”)

But my favorite song of the bunch was “Conjunction Junction.” I was humming it today as I came across a number of media reports that are generating an emerging picture of the relationships between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the al Qaeda terrorist thugs who killed three thousand Americans a little more than two years ago.

Wait a minute, you might say. Iraq and al Qaeda? Hasn’t this spurious argument for the war been rebutted long ago by the disclosure that, whatever the average American thinks, there was no connection? I can understand why reasonable people might come to this conclusion, given the massive media attention paid to attempted rebuttals and the artful language used by the Bush administration’s critics on the issue — they deny that Saddam Hussein instigated the 9/11 attacks, which virtually no one is alleging, while ignoring the increasingly compelling evidence that the Iraqi regime was at least an accessory to the first World Trade Center attacks in 1993, at least a financier and trainer of some al Qaeda-affiliated terror groups, and at least a well-wisher and facilitator of al Qaeda operatives in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

Let me be your Conjunction Junction today. Iraq and al Qaeda appear to have been conjoined on a number of fronts. First of all, there are credible reports that Islamists had received shelter, aid, and other assistance from the Saddam Hussein regime in the early 1990s, before the formal creation of Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda organization. This includes assistance to one of the perpetrators of the 1993 WTC attacks, as I mentioned. And it extended to a variety of terrorist organizations, including some with American blood on their hands.

With respect to the group Ansar al-Islam, which operated out of Northern Iraq until the coalition invasion, the complex story of this al Qaeda affiliate is told in an interesting new report from the Christian Science Monitor. It seems that both Iraq and Iran were supplying and assisting the Ansar killers (hey, I thought that Sunnis and Shias never collaborated on anything!). Each country would offer aid, then withhold it, trying to one-up the other and get some concesssions. Hussein clearly thought that allowing the group to operate out of Iraq and plan attacks on his Kurdish and Western enemies was in his interest, regardless of his personal lack of Islamist faith.

He thought wrongly.

More to the point of 9/11, Stephen Hayes writes in The Weekly Standard last week that there may have been some facilitation by an Iraqi agent in Malaysia, though this may well have not extended to actual prior notice or involvement in planning the attacks on New York and Washington. Meanwhile, new documents coming out of Iraq and translated by the invaluable group MEMRI show that Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda may have strengthened just prior to 9/11, that al Qaeda-affiliated thugs may have received battle instruction and terror training in Iraq, including hijacking recreations with replicas of airlines.

By itself, the evidence for the Saddam-al Qaeda connection is compelling but not conclusive. When you add it to the other problems created by the continued existence of his fascist regime — the threats to regional stability, the risk of proliferation, and the need to keep thousands of American troops and aircraft in Saudi Arabia to enforce a blockade that punished Saddam’s long-suffering people more than his minion — I belived before the war and continue to believe now that it was a justifiable use of military force to advance our national interest and the cause of peace and freedom in the world.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.