Collaboration or lack of planning?

While looking for a different article over at the Captain's Quarters, I came across this:

Wouldn't This Be Collaboration?
The Butler Report states that Abu Zarqawi began establishing terrorist cells in February 2003 in advance of the Iraq war, to fight a rearguard action in Baghdad against the invading Coalitions forces, according to the Washington Post...

He goes on to claim that Zarqawi establishing cells in Iraq in the lead up to the war proves that there is a collaboration between Al Qaeda and Iraq.

Perhaps I'm not the world's foremost expert on intelligence, but if al-Qaeda operatives were flooding into Baghdad and conducting joint operations with Iraqi security forces prior to the invasion, doesn't that demonstrate ... collaboration? It cannot possibly be argued that in the runup to the war, all of a sudden Saddam and AQ made all the necessary connections from a complete cold start to complete coordination of forces in preparation for a rearguard guerilla action. Besides, in February when this infiltration occurred, the final action was still in debate in the UNSC.

This information should silence all of the nonsense being tossed around about no connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda.

Well, here's the thing Captain Ed. I can make that argument. Reading through the article he describes, there is no claim that Al Qaeda had anything to do with Zarqawi or any other militant(the article refers to them only as "al Qaeda associated terrorist").

Why would terrorists head to Iraq ahead of an invasion that everyone knew was coming to strike at those it had struck once before? Could it be ease of access into the country combined with ample attempts to strike at the world's strongest military force?

The article itself says:

The CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency passed on warnings to Bush administration policymakers that U.S. forces would probably be attacked by "stay behind" Iraqi forces and Islamic terrorists who would be drawn to Iraq by the invasion, officials said.

Not that they were summoned to fight for Iraq or were part of a Sadaam/Al Qaeda plan. Besides, with in excess of one thousand dead as a result of these exact tactics, I would think this would be one of the last things you would look to draw support from. Reports like this should have added to the call for planning after the invasion occurred. And, it would seem that this report would fly in the face of these claims(all emphesis mine):

Some defense officials said privately in interviews that the plan in place for security after Baghdad's fall has been an utter failure. They said it failed to predict any significant resistance from Saddam loyalists, much less the deadly combination of Ba'athist holdouts and foreign terrorists preying daily on American troops.
"Every briefing on postwar Iraq I attended never mentioned any of this," said a civilian policy adviser.

and

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said in an interview this week with regional reporters that the Bush administration "underestimated" two developments.
"The first is that 35 years of Saddam Hussein's reign instilled into the hearts and into the souls of the Iraqi people a greater degree of terror than we understood," Mr. Armitage said. "The second was the nature or the extent to which Iraq had become full of criminal enterprise."

and

(From Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz):"Third, and worst of all, it was difficult to imagine before the war that the criminal gang of sadists and gangsters who have run Iraq for 35 years would continue fighting, fighting what has been called a guerrilla war," Mr. Wolfowitz said.

The Administration was warned aout these things before the war even began! How could they not have thought things like this would have happened?

Unlike Captain Ed, I will leave you to draw your own conclusions about this.