Jeffrey Goldberg published a bombshell story that convulsed the nation. No, I’m not talking about his recent Atlantic magazine piece claiming, based on the testimony of four anonymous sources, that President Trump had grossly disrespected America’s dead and wounded warriors in 2018.

I’m talking about Goldberg’s New Yorker feature claiming that “the relationship between Saddam’s regime and ­al-Qaeda is far closer than previously thought.” Published less than a year after 9/11, the story fed into the fervid pro-war atmosphere that then gripped the nation.

Headlined “The Great Terror,” the essay was based on a reporting trip to Iraq’s northern Kurdish zone. It recounted, in terrifying and admirable detail, Saddam Hussein’s 1988 poison-gas assault against Kurdish civilians in the village of Halabja.

Along the way, Goldberg did other things, too — chief among them, speaking to alleged terrorist detainees in a prison run by a pro-regime-change Kurdish faction.

The mostly unnamed prisoners, per Goldberg, informed him “that the intelligence service of Saddam Hussein has joint control, with al-Qaeda operatives, over [a local jihadist faction]; that Saddam Hussein hosted a senior leader of al-Qaeda in Baghdad in 1992; that a number of al-Qaeda members fleeing ­Afghanistan have been secretly brought into territory controlled by [the local jihadists]; and that Iraqi intelligence agents smuggled conventional weapons, and possibly even chemical and biological weapons, into Afghanistan.” //

Pretty chilling stuff. The Bush administration made Saddam’s ties to al-Qaeda a key plank of its case for regime change. The war happened. Saddam was toppled. But in the years that followed, the Iraq-al-Qaeda link posited by Goldberg unraveled.