I have a question.
Has there ever, in the four months since it broke, been a refutation of, an official response to, or even a developed conservative talking point on the story that Pentagon plans to take out Zarqawi before the Iraq war were vetoed by the White House, because Zarqawi was more convenient as a living terrorist in Iraq who could help justify the war? (See long-ago posts from Mark Kleiman and Kevin Drum, and this follow-up from Fred Kaplan in Slate. Kevin and Brad DeLong have both made efforts to keep the story alive, to no great avail.)
At the time this seemed to me a huge, terrible story. Given a possibility for real pre-emption against one of the worst terrorists out there, the administration said no, for bad reasons. And many hundreds have since died at that terrorist’s hands or under his orders.
It was the sort of thing that, had it been asserted by The Nation or Michael Moore or Wesley Clark, would have been trumpeted by the right as evidence of the unhinged conspiratorial thinking of the left. Reported and (apprently reliably though in part anonymously) sourced by NBC, it went, as far as I can tell, entirely unanswered, but also almost entirely unnoticed. At first I assumed that it was so extreme and appalling a claim that there was almost certainly a credible counter-story or at least contrary interpretation to be offered. But I never saw it.
But before I finally file such a dreadful item as “probably true” in my mind I want to ask the Conspiracy’s readers, many of whom give the administration much more benefit of the doubt than I do any more: were we ever offered any reason not to believe this story? Was it denied, refuted, or responded to? A denial doesn’t disprove it, of course, but has there even been a denial?
Links appreciated. I’ll update this post, if useful information comes in (but I won’t update just to quote e-mails that say “Of course it can’t be true!”).
Update:
I’ve sent versions of this reply to versions of this question several times already; I’m going to post it here and be done with it.
All it takes for you to believe that it is probably true is to not hear a denial? I’ll tell you what is “probably true”. It is probably true that the administration decided that such a dumb and insulting claim did not deserve a response.
I don’t expect denials of every made-up story in The Nation, a Michael Moore movie, or a left-wing blog. If the original claim has no evidentiary weight, then a denial just brings unwarranted attention to the claim– although one can usually count on bloggers or the opinion press to take the time to refute even that kind of thing.
But when genuine reporters from a major news organization that I know to be bound by mainstream American journalistic rules about sources (i.e. not a British tabloid) report such a claim and source it to the Pentagon, with supporting statements from a named former NSC member, that has some serious evidentiary weight. It creates some presumption that there’s truth to it. I’ve been trying to suspend judgment, pending hearing a reply. The reply might not be dispositive, any mor ethan the story is. But, in the absence of such a reply, eventually I’ve got to stop waiting for one and weigh some evidence on one side against no evidence on the other.
A denial doesn’t have to mean Ari Fleischer standing up and talking about it at his daily press conference. It might just take the form of a National Review reporter calling some anonymous sources at the NSC who give a rebuttal to NBC’s anonymous Pentagon sources. Instead, there has been, as far as I can tell, less of a response to the NBC story than to any given loony Michael Moore theory. Given the number of outlets for journalists to refute to nutty stuff from the fringe, I kept expecting to see someone take the time to put some evidence on the other side of this story from a real news organization. And now I’m publicly soliciting such evidence, or links to any refutations or denials. Given that, if the story is false, it seems to me a much more important use of time to refute it than to refute the fringe material that people do devote the effort to denying, eventually I think we have to take the lack of response as telling in its own right.
Update:
On “This Week,” Sunday June 27 (i.e. two days ago), Condoleeza Rice said
Let me just say we never had as far, as we know, we never had a chance to get Zarqawi. That camp was taken out at the beginning of the war against Iraq. The poisons network was largely broken up through other means, parts of it broken up in Europe. But we’ve known about Zarqawi for a long time. Measures were taken, for instance, to try to get the Iraqi government to turn Zarqawi over when it was believed that he was in Baghdad. And the Iraqi government would not comply with that request that was made through a number of intelligence services. So, Zarqawi was on people’s radar screens. There were, I can tell you that we do not believe there was an opportunity to get him at that time.
[via Nexis; hat tip commenter V from VJ on Brad DeLong’s site.] So there’s at least one public statement that is in pretty direct contradiction to the sources in the story. If not having had an “opportunity” means that taking out the camp was logistically impossible, that doesn’t seem very persuasive, since once the war started it was taken out pretty quickly and without any forces that couldn’t have been there before the war (i.e. the fight didn’t depend on U.S. heavy armor). If it means that we were never sufficiently sure that Zarqawi was in the camp at any given moment, that seems like a better argument– and the kind of argument that one really has to hope was what really happened.
I’ll be posting again at some point, with responses to a number of arguments that have been put to me in e-mail, and this Sebastian Holsclaw post, but for now I did want to mention that we do now have an on-the-record statement that there was not a viable opportunity to attack Zarqawi. Now, if I had my druthers, I’druther see NBC go back to its Pentagon sources for a reply, or for someone to ask Rice or the NSC what was unviable about the Pentagon’s attack plans.
Update:
See more above.
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