I’m working to synthesize a lot of information. For now:
David Meyer has a very thorough rundown and chronology. It includes the passages from a Greg Miller LA Times article from February of 2003– a full year before the NBC story.
[l]awmakers who have attended classified briefings on the camp say they have been stymied for months in their efforts to get an explanation for why the United States has not begun a military strike on the compound near the village of Khurmal.
Absent an explanation from the White House, some officials suggested the administration had refrained from striking the compound in part to preserve a key piece of its case against Iraq.
“This is it. This is their compelling evidence for use of force,” said one intelligence official, who asked not to be identified. “If you take it out, you can’t use it as justification for war.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of the intelligence panel, said she and other members had been frustrated in their attempts to get an explanation from administration officials in closed-door briefings.
“We’ve been asking this question and have not been given an answer,” Feinstein said. Officials have replied that “they’ll have to get back to us.”
Asked whether the White House might have rejected hitting the site to avoid complicating its efforts to build support for war against Iraq, she said: “That’s an obvious thought. I hope not.”
Tom Veal points out that there was at least one public response to the NBC story in March, from Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs Peter Rodman, under Congressional questioning.
I do know something about the planning. We had our eye on that location, Kirma. But I’m not sure I agree with the characterization of the decisions that were made. Any kind of operation is complicated. And I do know that we had our eye on that location. There were discussions in the administration. And obviously no attack was made.
But I don’t recall anyone discussing on either side of the discussion anyone saying, well, no, we don’t want to do this because it will interfere with a plan to go after Saddam. I mean, you could have made the opposite argument that it would — if we had found something interesting there, it would have — could have strengthened our case.
This isn’t a particularly decisive denial, even in conjunction with the Rice comments from Sunday. (I’ll eventually assemble all this into a single post with links.) But there it is, for whatever you think it’s worth.
Sebastian Holsclaw suggests that the issue was diplomatic: while in the midst of building the case for war, it was simply thought to be too sensitive to launch a unilateral strike against terrorists on what was nominally Iraqi territory. I’ve heard this from a number of other people as well. At first this looks dubious, given that the first Pentagon plan was in June 2002. But it’s true that in June we didn’t know we were still 8-9 months away from the final UN diplomatic stalemate, and we didn’t know there was going to be such a stalemate.
I have to say that I find this only a slightly less bad reason for refraining than the one NBC’s Pentagon sources alleged. It still amounts to a prioritization of the large-scale Iraq War over a pre-emptive strike on an al-Qaeda affiliated, ricin-equipped terrorist. And it’s not the same as Rice’s claim that there was never a moment when we could have been sure about getting Zarqawi. (I’m also going to blog later on about the distinction between the two legitimate targets, the ricin-equipped Ansar al-Islam camp and Zarqawi himself, and what work that distinction does and doesn’t do.)
A claim that a number of people have e-mailed me that won’t stand up is that there’s nothing to criticize in retrospect since at the time we didn’t know how bad Zarqawi was. This is false. At the time he hadn’t killed as many people, of course; he’s had a busy, bloody year. But the camp was referred to, often, in building the case for war, including in Powell’s UN speech. There were ricin attacks planned and successfully stopped in Europe. They provided a living, breathing example of the central nightmare scenario: al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorists with unconventional weapons. The U.S. had even tried to cooperate with Hussein to get Zarqawi arrested and extradited when the latter was in Baghdad; the very fact that Hussein refused was cited as evidence of his collaboration with Zarqawi. Both Zarqawi himself and the camp were understood at the time to be very bad, very big deals. It seems to me that any acceptable reasons for not having attacked the camp ASAP must be logistical. And Feinstein, Cressey, Michael O’Hanlon, and the unnamed Pentagon officials are all denying that there were sufficient, or sufficiently-explained, logistical obstacles.
Finally, many people have e-mailed– and this has the ring of truth to me– that there might have been a reluctance on the part of the Administration to launch a strike that was heavy on cruise missiles and bombers, given Bush’s dismissal of such strikes in the early days after 9/11. (Remembering Clinton’s cruise missile strikes against bin Laden’s camps, Bush insisted that that was the wrong way to proceed.) But, as became evident in the evtnual attack on the base, that wasn’t really what was at issue. There were Kurdish pesh mergas ready, willing, and able to take part in a ground assault, provide that they had some Special Forces and air support.
More to come, including some questions that I’d love to see NBC ask its original sources or some investigative reporter for a newspaper follow up on.
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