Daniel Benjamin, a former member of the National Security Council and co-author of The Age of Sacred Terror argues in today's New York Times that Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda Are Not Allies.

Benjamin says that "Iraq and Al Qaeda are not obvious allies. In fact, they are natural enemies."

"A central tenet of Al Qaeda's jihadist ideology is that secular Muslim rulers and their regimes have oppressed the believers and plunged Islam into a historic crisis. ...To contemporary jihadists, Saddam Hussein is another in a line of dangerous secularists, an enemy of the faith."

Benjamin says the reverse is also true: "Saddam Hussein has long recognized that Al Qaeda and like-minded Islamists represent a threat to his regime. Consequently, he has shown no interest in working with them against their common enemy, the United States."

"Mr. Hussein has remained true to the unwritten rules of state sponsorship of terror: never get involved with a group that cannot be controlled and never give a weapon of mass destruction to terrorists who might use it against you."

"...while we may have to go to war with Mr. Hussein eventually, he still has a country that he wishes to hold on to, and that fact will govern all his calculations. Mr. bin Laden, by contrast, has said that Muslims have a duty to obtain nuclear weapons. After Sept. 11, no one should doubt that he and his followers would put them to use."

Another reason not to go to war against Iraq now, and instead to keep focusing on Al-Qaeda and the jihadists, is this:

"It is also worth considering how a war in Iraq might further the jihadist cause. With his regime threatened, Mr. Hussein might break the taboo on giving terrorists weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, as images of the United States attacking another Muslim nation are beamed throughout the Middle East and South Asia, many will take it as confirmation of Mr. bin Laden's argument that America is at war with Islam."

In short, according to Benjamin, the President is simply wrong when he says "you can't distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talk about the war on terror." Such talk just reinforces "widely held misunderstandings about the extraordinary danger of the new religious terrorism."