Islamabad, Pakistan ? It’s a nightmare scenario: Al-Qaida terrorists, funded by Osama bin Laden’s millions and with access to Saddam Hussein’s hidden stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons, unleash carnage that dwarfs even the fury of the Sept. 11 attacks.

In making his case for possible war with Iraq, President Bush warned such a day might come if America fails to act, but there is no known evidence of a link between Washington’s chief villains.

The two men — one married to religious extremism, the other a calculating secularist — would make strange bedfellows, agreeing perhaps only on their hatred for the United States.

“Ideologically and logically, they cannot work together,” Gen. Hamid Gul, the former chief of Pakistan’s spy agency InterServices Intelligence, told The Associated Press. “Bin Laden and his men considered Saddam the killer of hundreds of Islamic militants,” a reference to Saddam’s relentless crackdowns on domestic political rivals, including Kurds and Shiites.

In his State of the Union address Tuesday, Bush used the alleged link between Saddam and al-Qaida as a major argument in his push for a tough stance on Iraq.

“Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al-Qaida,” the president said.

“Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans — this time armed by Saddam. It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known,” he added.

The president offered no new evidence, but he said Secretary of State Colin Powell would present the U.S. case to the United Nations next week.

Bush’s comments were dismissed by Iraqi Deputy Prime Minister Tariq Aziz.

“I absolutely deny that,” Aziz told the British Broadcasting Corp. “Historically speaking, everybody in the region, everybody in the world knows Iraq has no connection with al-Qaida. We are quite different people — different in ideology, different in practice.”

Certainly, an alliance between Saddam and bin Laden would have seemed impossible before Sept. 11.

In 1999, bin Laden was considering leaving Afghanistan amid U.S. pressure on the Taliban to kick him out in the wake of the al-Qaida-linked bombings a year earlier of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

Going to Iraq was apparently never an option.

A Taliban commander told The Associated Press at the time that despite Saddam’s battle with the United States, bin Laden would not relocate to Iraq because “he has differences with Saddam. He is not a good Muslim. Saddam does not care about Islam like Osama.” The commander refused to be identified for fear of reprisal.

Indeed, Saddam’s Baath party is just the sort of secular Arab government that the ultra-religious al-Qaida organization would be likely to oppose. Bin Laden’s beliefs sprung from the deeply conservative Wahhabi movement, which rejects smoking, drinking and socializing between men and women.

Baath socialism, by contrast, emerged in the 1950s as a mix of leftist economics, Arab nationalism and secular social policy, though Saddam has drawn on religion more and more since his defeat in the 1991 Gulf War.

Analysts caution that history means nothing in the shifting realities of the post-Sept. 11 world.

“On the face of it, their views of the role of religion in running an Arab society make them strange bedfellows, but that they could become united due to their sheer loathing of the United States — it would be foolish to exclude such a possibility,” said Warren Bass, a Middle East expert at the New York-based Council on Foreign Relations.