The United States deliberately passed up repeated opportunities to kill the head of al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jordanian-born terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, before the March 2003 US-led invasion of that country.

The claim, by former US spy Mike Scheuer, was made in an interview to be shown on ABC TV’s Four Corners tonight.

Zarqawi is often described as a lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, whose supporters masterminded the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington.

Mr Scheuer was a CIA agent for 22 years – six of them as head of the agency’s Osama bin Laden unit – until he resigned in 2004.

He told Four Corners that during 2002, the Bush Administration received detailed intelligence about Zarqawi’s training camp in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Mr Scheuer claims that a July 2002 plan to destroy the camp lapsed because “it was more important not to give the Europeans the impression we were gunslingers”. ~The Age

Via Andrew Sullivan

This was a story broken by Jim Miklaszewski over two years ago, citing “U.S. officials” and “U.S. government sources.” Those attributions suggested that they were not former intelligence officers like Scheuer, so Scheuer is reconfirming something that Milkaszewski’s sources already told us without going on record with their names. Scheuer, as most readers will recognise right away, is the author of Imperial Hubris, who originally went by Anonymous.

The “die-hard antiwar” point to be made, which Sullivan misses, is that the preoccupation with preparing the way for the invasion of Iraq outweighed actually striking at Zarqawi himself when he was there in northern Iraq. As a “die-hard antiwar” conservative, I know that one of the consistent critiques antiwar conservatives and libertarians have made was that, in addition to the Iraq-terrorism connection being spurious and not credible, attacking Iraq was taking us away from the proper fight against al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Here we have the obsession with Iraq dramatically and adversely affecting that fight. Letting Zarqawi get away is notable because it was allegedly Zarqawi who represented the link between al-Qaeda and Iraq, because he was loosely affiliated with bin Laden and was in northern Iraq (outside of Hussein’s effective control, of course, but why get hung up on detail?).

Viewed in a cynical way, one could say that Bush did not want to eliminate Zarqawi so that he would not have eliminated the only extremely remote connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq. That is to say, striking at the remotely al-Qaeda-affiliated Islamic terrorists in Kurdistan did not require the full-scale invasion of Iraq, and Mr. Bush clearly must have known that in 2002; Ansar al-Islam was based well north of the (illegal) no-fly zone boundary, which would have made striking at the base in conjunction with Kurdish forces or on our own just one more military operation in the undeclared air war against Iraq. Since Hussein did not sponsor or support Ansar al-Islam (Kurdish Islamists not being his cup of tea for all kinds of obvious reasons), the invasion of Iraq was not only a distraction from genuine antiterrorist efforts but actually precluded them in this case. That Zarqawi has since returned to haunt the occupation of Iraq with bloody mayhem is an ugly piece of poetic justice that damns (again) the pre-war judgement of this administration as hopelessly fixated on attacking Iraq.

But however you want to slice the pre-war questions, the reality is that the man whom the government blames for the spectacular murderous car bombings and many of the anti-Shi’ite terrorist attacks in Iraq could have been killed and his organisation disrupted in 2002 and Mr. Bush chose to attack the Iraqi state rather than actual Islamic terrorists when he had the chance. Let Mr. Bush publicly defend that decision.