Whenever you hear Bush or Cheney or a campaign surrogate link Hussein and Zarqawi, or talk about how invading Iraq was supposed to help fight terrorism, remember that the White House blocked Pentagon efforts to take out Zarqawi for fear of undermining the case for the invasion:
- [A]s NBC News reported last March (and as almost nobody has picked up since), the Bush administration had several opportunities to bomb Zarqawi's camp well before the war. On at least two occasions the U.S. military drew up plans for an attack. But the White House rejected the proposals—mainly because shutting down Zarqawi's operation would have removed a key rationale for invading Iraq. This was a jaw-dropping bit of cynicism: Bush sold, and continues to sell, the war in Iraq as a major campaign in the global war on terrorism, yet he repeatedly passed up the chance to neutralize or kill one of the most dangerous terrorists (Zarqawi has spent much of his time lately chopping off the heads of foreign contractors) for fear of weakening the case for war.
Fred Kaplan in
Slate today.
If the White House had let the Pentagon bomb Zarqawi's camp, maybe there'd be fewer people losing their heads these days.
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