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This MSNBC article is about Abu Musab Zarqawi, an affiliate of the Ansar al-Islam terrorist organization responsible for over 700 deaths in Iraq, including (supposedly) the newest attack that killed a few hundred the other day. It's frightening and disturbing - not only because of how dangerous this group might be, but because of how our government has responded to them in the past. Most disturbing, however, is why they responded the way they did.
As it turns out from the article, and as Matthew Yglesias explains in more detail over at Tapped, The Pentagon and the military had plans, but“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. On three different occasions they tried to destroy the camps in Iraq, which were in Kurdish Controlled Norther Iraq (i.e. not within Saddam's reach). All three times, the White House shot down the plans.
Wanna know why?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. What could be scarier than that? What's more frightening, a terrorist camp in Iraq that is able to produce chemical weapons and get them to Europe, or an American administration who knows this, has the ability to stop them, and doesn't... all for political reasons to expedite the rush to war with Saddam? Yglesias explains the backstory.The backstory here is that before the war Ansar al-Islam was an organization with some link to al-Qaeda (the extent of these links remains unclear) operating in Kurdish territory in northern Iraq, outside of the control of Saddam Hussein's military and police apparatus. The Bush administration response to this was to mount a sustained campaign of dissembling, lacing statements and television appearances with references to a terrorist group operating "inside Iraq" with no mention made of the fact that though it was technically inside Iraqi borders it was outside of the Iraqi government's sphere of control. As a means of selling the war to the American public, this was highly effective since the deception was essentially unchallenged in the mainstream media (though it also hurt U.S. credibility abroad, complicating diplomatic efforts), but it always suffered from a key logical flaw: We were free to attack Ansar's camps whenever we wanted to without toppling the Iraqi regime since the camps were located within the U.S.-patrolled no-fly zone. The rest of his explanation is here.
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