Most LGF readers know that the world’s terror gangs cooperate and share resources. But amazingly, as Michael Ledeen writes, many people who should understand this simple concept are still shocked when they discover evidence of it: The Terror Masters Revisited.

Saturday’s Washington Post had an article that quotes the usual unnamed intelligence sources saying that they are surprised to discover that al Qaeda has “reconstitute[d]” itself. This surprise derives from, inter alia, the computer data found recently in Pakistan, intelligence sources (both ours and friends’), and simply looking at the range of activities in which the terrorists engage.

This surprise is, as usual, unsettling, since it has been quite clear for some time now that al Qaeda and the other major terrorist groups — Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, Jamaa, etc. — are all working together, and have been ever since we went into Afghanistan. The cooperation increased in the run-up to Operation Iraqi Freedom, and was only possible because the regimes who gave the bulk of the operational support to the terrorists — Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia — worked closely to coordinate the anti-American jihad. That coordination has, for the most part, continued (note the visit of Bashar Assad to Tehran at the time of the turnover of “sovereignty” in Iraq. At those meetings, Syria and Iran agreed on a five-point plan to attack us in Iraq, Europe, and at home, and to do everything possible — including massive efforts to get the price of oil as high as they can — to defeat President Bush in November’s elections).

This helps understand the coordination between, say, attacks by the forces of Moqtada al Sadr and Baathist “loyalists.” The infrastructure was created before we ever arrived in Iraq.