Am I the only one a little mystified by the furor over the supposed debate on al-Qaeda connections to Iraq? As far as I can tell, the substantive stories being told are factually identical: To wit, everyone agrees that senior Iraqi officials and senior al-Qaeda officials met on various occasions. Woo-hoo. Nobody, as far as I know, has produced any evidence that this resulted in any kind of substantive cooperation. As far as I can tell, the big difference is that the administration hopes that by continuing to stress “contacts,” they’ll be able to let people infer cooperation, even though they can’t come out and explicitly claim there’s any evidence for that.