"Secular Saddam"
This is probably one of the most pervasive anti-war myths, "proving" that radical Islamic terrorists and Saddam were natural enemies.
This article describes Saddam's "secularism."
A more detailed article here, from December of 2002:
Mosque-building — on a scale, Iraqi officials say, that no Arab leader has undertaken since the days of the great Abbasid caliphs who ruled the Arab world from Baghdad until the middle of the 13th century — has become Mr. Hussein's grand obsession. He has set out to make Baghdad the undisputed center of Islamic architecture, as it was under the Abbasids, and the only thing that has stopped him from building even bigger, the officials say, is a concern not to outstrip the Islamic holy places in Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
A few miles from the Mother of All Battles Mosque, two others are rising that will dwarf it. One five times the size, with many similar features in celebration of Mr. Hussein, is to be known as the Mosque of Saddam the Great. It is visible in skeleton form on the bulldozed plain that used to be Baghdad's airport, and is due to be completed in 2015. A mile or two beyond, in a gigantic cluster of domes that seem borrowed from the design book for Las Vegas, is the Al-Rahman Mosque, meaning "the most merciful," heading for completion in 2004.
Part of the message the Iraqi leader is sending with his mosque-building is that he, Saddam Hussein, is the natural leader of an Arab world yearning for past glories under the banner of Islam that fluttered atop the Arab armies that conquered much of the ancient world after the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632. But the lesson encoded in the Mother of All Battles Mosque, or Umm al-Mahare, as it is called in Arabic, seems to be much narrower, and aimed like its Kalashnikov-and-Scud minarets at a more selected audience: the United States.
Whether or not he was a sincere believer is utterly irrelevant. The point is, during the latter portion of his rule, when he could see where the wind was blowing, he was working on convincing enough people of his Muslim bona fides it to use it as another stepping stone to power, and could have used the appeal of jihad as effectively as any Imam.
Come to that, you can bet many of the current radical Islamic leaders are no different in their sincerities and motivations.
An alliance of convenience between Saddam and jihadist forces (not just al Qaeda) was not only very possible (actually factual if you look at a lot of the documentation), but almost inevitable.
The "Secular Saddam" myth is part of the larger "harmless Saddam" myth. Doesn't take much work to blow that one out of the water either.