By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

John McCain has executed an Islamic-style divorce from reality. Three times he’s said that Iran is training al Qaeda.

Wrong. Once he even admitted he was wrong, but his campaign HQ went back to the original goofiness two days later.

To some, the Republican candidate’s strange behavior was a replay of that historic 1976 campaign gaffe, when President Gerald R. Ford declared that Poland was “independent and autonomous” from the Soviet Union.

Millions of Poles found that surprising.

Ford had a chance to regroup, but he passed it up. He insisted that “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, and there never will be under a Ford administration.”

You could still hear the guffaws at the polling booth.

Likewise, McCain’s headquarters put out a reaffirmation of the candidate’s confusion about who was on what side in Iraq during a press conference in Jordan.

Mind you, this was two days after McCain, nudged by traveling companion Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman , I-Conn, corrected and amended his accusation that Iranian operatives in Iraq have been “taking al Qaeda into Iran, training them and sending them back.”

Lieberman whispered in his ear.

“I’m sorry,” McCain said, “the Iranians are training extremists, not al Qaeda”.

Well, yes, and some of those “extremists” are followers of Iraqi Shiite political parties in the government we are propping up in Baghdad.

McCain had it backward, in other words.

To be sure, elements in Iran, the Shiites’ Vatican, have indeed entered into a few marriages of convenience with their historical arch enemy, the Sunnis, by helping al Qaeda here and there.

But to insist that the fortunes of al Qaeda, whose roots go deep in Sunni asceticism, are tied to Shiite Iran, is absurd. It misses the whole point.

It’s like saying Northern Ireland’s Protestants were creatures of the Pope.

Haven’t we been here before?

Liberals bloggers and the media jumped all over McCain, the former Vietnam fighter pilot and prisoner of war, some recalling my widely circulated columns here and here exposing the ignorance of top American intelligence officials about the Middle East.

So, is McCain still a bottom-half-of-the-class student, like he was at the U.S. Naval Academy? Or does he understand the power of linking al Qaeda to Iran all too well?

Either way, it’s loser.

But what was missing in the heckling of McCain was the other half of the al Qaeda equation.

The inconvenient truth is that al Qaeda and its supporters gets their lion’s share of money and manpower from sources in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Pakistan, Sunni bastions all, and America’s key allies in the war on terror.

In addition, Libya, a nascent U.S. ally (see below), and North Africa in general, has also proved to be fertile recruiting grounds for al Qaeda, according to a treasure trove of documents captured in Iraq last year.

The future suicide bombers are smuggled into Iraq in small groups from Syria, said the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., which analyzed the documents. They are Sunni Arabs, in other words, not Iraqi Shiites supported or trained by Iran.

Gerald Ford never recovered from his Polish moment, and lost to former Georgia Gov. and peanut farmer Jimmy Carter.

Of course, he had other problems — the Vietnam and Cambodian debacles, domestic spying scandals, his pardon of the disgraced Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate affair.

But ever since, Ford’s Polish moment has been the measuring rod for campaign gaffes.

Will McCain suffer a similar fate?

A number of factors argue against it.

It’s too early, for starters.

Ford stumbled at the climax of both campaigns, when millions of Americans were riveted to the television debate.

In contrast, McCain’s moment occurred far away, and involved issues too complicated for most Americans to understand, not to mention members of Congress and national security officials themselves.

As for his campaign staff’s bizarre statement repudiation of their candidate’s apology, it’s unlikely it made it past the blogosphere to the water cooler.

Finally, while Ford’s Polish moment drew a national howl, conservative writers such as the New York Sun’s Eli Lake have been making a somewhat effective counterargument by stitching together instances of Iran-al Qaeda cooperation.

So McCain probably escaped relatively unscathed.

Still, he and his supporters must know this: He cannot afford another moment like that.

WHITE HOUSE ASKS CONGRESS TO EXEMPT LIBYA FROM VICTIM PAYMENTS

The wheels of history usually leave a lot of bodies in their tracks.

So it is with the Bush administration’s embrace of Libya since it renounced nuclear weapons.

Washington has found a new partner in the war on terror and a base to pursue al Qaeda-linked individuals and groups across North Africa.

American firms have been lining up to exploit Muammar el-Qaddafi’s oil and gas reserves and sell the Libyans everything from toothbrushes to Internet technology.

Nothing it seems, will be allowed to get in their way, including victims of the 1989 Pan Am 103 sabotage and the 1986 La Belle discotheque bombing in Germany, which together killed hundreds of Americans.

Libyan agents were found guilty in both attacks. Eventually, confronted with multiple suits by the victims’ families, the regime agreed to a pay out.

Not surprisingly, Qaddafi stopped paying when the Bush administration announced its intention to stop branding Libya a state sponsor of terrorism.

Instead of telling the Libyans they had to pay up before any more bilateral improvements could be made, however, the Bush administration officials began treating the families like gum on their shoes.

The latest shameful chapter came last week, when President Bush and four cabinet chiefs banded together to “propose” that Congress immediately pass new legislation exempting Libya from a provision of the 2008 Defense authorization law (PL 110-181), which allows victims to pursue the sponsors of terrorism in court.

“When states, at our urging take the necessary steps [to get off the terrorism list], the United States has a strong interest in developing commercial and security relations with them to provide a continuing incentive to stand with us against the threats of global terrorism,” said the letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., signed by Bush and the secretaries of State, Defense, Energy and Commerce.

The existing law will have “a chilling effect on potentially billions of dollars in investments by U.S. companies in Libya’s oil sector,” the letter went on, “investments affecting U. S. energy security, and on substantial anticipated U.S. construction projects with Libya.”

What stirred them into such a tizzy?

Thomas F. Fay, a lawyer for some of the La Belle victims, had just filed liens against 15 corporations and law firms doing business with Libya.

“It doesn’t stop them from doing business [with Libya],” Fay told me, “but they can’t use any Libyan assets” — i.e., money — “to do business with them.”

No money, no contracts.

Liens (technically, lis pendens, “suit pending”) were filed against every global energy company with offices in the United States, as well as such blue ribbon law firms as White & Case, headquartered in New York City, which act as middlemen in foreign transactions.

It’s not likely U.S. or other foreign companies will do business without such middlemen, Fay said, which would demand up-front deposits of “millions of dollars” from Qaddafi to make sure the vendors will get paid.

“The Libyans don’t pay their bills,” he said,

Neither Reid nor Sen. Frank R. Lautenburg, D-N.J., who wrote the lawsuits amendment, could be reached for comment.

In his letter of protest to Reid, Fay called the administration’s arguments phony.

“Let’s look at the facts,” he wrote in his March 20 letter.

“United Press International reports that oil closed yesterday at $109.23 per barrel. Yesterday’s production then brought Libya $193,337,200.00.

“The amount necessary to pay the 38 people represented by this firm the $3 million owed by Libya to each of them” he continued, “is $114,000,000.00.”

How much time would Libya’s oil fields need to come up with that kind of dough?

Fourteen hours and 10 minutes, Fay calculated.

The administration’s position dishonors the U.S. servicemen and women who died in the Pan Am and La Belle discotheque bombings.

“We respectfully ask that you, and every member of the Congress, stand by the promise implied in the oath taken by each member of the Armed Forces, that in return for their sacrifices we will support them, that we will, as Lincoln put it ‘care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan,’” said Fay.

BACKCHANNEL CHATTER

Spooky Memoir: Former CIA counterintelligence operative Brian Kelley, wrongly accused of being a Russian mole in the Robert Hanssen case, has just written his own view of the events for Studies in Intelligence, the CIA’s in-house publication. Possibly available online next week. Kelley’s piece is a heart-breaking tale. The FBI’s focus on Kelley, instead of one of its own, Hanssen, didn’t make it into “Breach,” the 2007 movie dramatizing the case.

Book Beating: Veteran investigative reporter and former House Foreign Affairs Committee staffer Stephen Weissman has escalated his campaign against New York Times reporter Tim Weiner’s book, “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA,” Last week I reported on a few of the problems Weissman and others have with the book’s sourcing, as well as Weiner’s response in general to the criticism, but Weismann goes much, much deeper at Talking Points Memo.