On Tuesday, explosions killed dozens of people in Iraq as Shiite Muslims gathered for the feast of Ashura, a holiday that Saddam Hussein wouldn’t let Iraqis celebrate.
Dick Cheney, in a CNN interview a few hours after the news of the attacks reached the airwaves, seemed pretty sure who was responsible.
Cheney: Well, today we don’t know specifically about this attack yet. It has the hallmarks, in my opinion, of an attack orchestrated by a man named al-Zarqawi.
Blitzer: Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Cheney: That’s right. We’ve talked about him a lot before. He, at one point, ran a training camp in Afghanistan before we went into Afghanistan. He took refuge in Iraq and was there prior to our invasion of Iraq. He oversaw the poisons labs in northeastern Iraq that were al Qaeda-affiliated, run by Ansar al-Islam. He has recently written a letter to senior management of Osama bin Laden’s group, al Qaeda, that we intercepted, where he talked specifically about his strategy in Iraq, and that includes, among other things, launching terror strikes against Shia in order to try to start sectarian —
Blitzer: So you see his fingerprints there.
Cheney: And this looks very much like that kind of an attack.
Cheney’s accurate was absolutely right. Zarqawi is a Jordanian with strong ties to Al Queda. Nearly everyone seems to believe he was responsible, at least in part, for Tuesday’s slayings and hundreds more just like them.
What Cheney neglected to mention, however, is that the administration could have eliminated Zarqawi and his cohorts as a threat, but the White House decided against it.
As NBC News discovered, the White House declined to take action against Zarqawi when they had the chance.
NBC News has learned that long before the war the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out his terrorist operation and perhaps kill Zarqawi himself — but never pulled the trigger.
In June 2002, U.S. officials say intelligence had revealed that Zarqawi and members of al-Qaida had set up a weapons lab at Kirma, in northern Iraq, producing deadly ricin and cyanide.
The Pentagon quickly drafted plans to attack the camp with cruise missiles and airstrikes and sent it to the White House, where, according to U.S. government sources, the plan was debated to death in the National Security Council.
“Here we had targets, we had opportunities, we had a country willing to support casualties, or risk casualties after 9/11 and we still didn’t do it,” said Michael O’Hanlon, military analyst with the Brookings Institution.
Four months later, intelligence showed Zarqawi was planning to use ricin in terrorist attacks in Europe.
The Pentagon drew up a second strike plan, and the White House again killed it. By then the administration had set its course for war with Iraq.
“People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president’s policy of preemption against terrorists,” according to terrorism expert and former National Security Council member Roger Cressey.
In January 2003, the threat turned real. Police in London arrested six terror suspects and discovered a ricin lab connected to the camp in Iraq.
The Pentagon drew up still another attack plan, and for the third time, the National Security Council killed it.
I can appreciate that hindsight is 20-20, and if the administration had it to do over again, they probably would have made a different decision. But the fact remains that when the White House claimed to be waging a war on terrorism, and bringing justice to Al Queda and its network, Bush decided to shift his administration’s focus to Iraq, which wasn’t working with Al Queda, wasn’t responsible for 9/11, and didn’t represent a threat to the United States.
In other words, the White House made a terrible mistake and moved away from what should have been the real target.
Three times the Defense Department was prepared to strike at Zarqawi and three times the White House said no — because they couldn’t be distracted from Iraq.
NBC added:
Military officials insist their case for attacking Zarqawi’s operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam.
The United States did attack the camp at Kirma at the beginning of the war, but it was too late — Zarqawi and many of his followers were gone. “Here’s a case where they waited, they waited too long and now we’re suffering as a result inside Iraq,” Cressey added.
And despite the Bush administration’s tough talk about hitting the terrorists before they strike, Zarqawi’s killing streak continues today.
This is the kind of story that should be on the front page of every paper for a week. Every time Bush’s campaign team says the White House is making us safer and offering bold leadership on the war on terror, someone needs to ask why they chose to let Zarqawi get away — three times.