BUSH TURNED DOWN THREE CHANCES TO GET ZARQAWI

WAYYYYY back before the media finally woke up to the story about "senior administration official(s)" revealing the name of CIA undercover agent Valerie Plame as payback to her husband Ambassador Joe Wilson for his truth-telling about the Niger uranium lie in the President's State of the Union address, I told a friend that that would be the scandal that would bring Bush down. It's still under investigation. No doubt the investigation won't be completed until after the November election. Certainly no one has paid a penalty for this illegal and traitorous act (using George H.W. Bush's own words). Except Mr. and Mrs. Wilson and the network she had built up to help control the proliferation of WMD.

When the administration's own David Kay at last reported that there were no WMD in Iraq and that our intelligence was woefully incorrect, I thought, okay, the public won't like it that we've just gone to war for, basically, no reason, or at least not the reason we were sold. But no one has paid any penalty for that, either.

Then when the truth came out about the administration's misleading the Congress about the real projected costs of the Medicare prescription benefit bill, I thought, "This will do it." The story has, for all intents and purposes, died, and no one has lost a job over it.

Now, brought to our attention by Mark Kleiman, THIS, if it doesn't bring down the Bushies at last and for good, will just prove what I desperately DON'T want to believe -- that a goodly portion of the American public just plain doesn't want to think for themselves and prefers a lazy, selfish, venal, good-old-boy to lead them because he doesn't challenge their hearts, minds or consciences. If the mainstream media doesn't get all over this story, and if Congress doesn't call for immediate hearings, I give up.

The second news story that heaves more burdens on the president comes from an NBC News broadcast by Jim Miklaszewski on March 2. Apparently, Bush had three opportunities, long before the war, to destroy a terrorist camp in northern Iraq run by Abu Musab Zarqawi, the al-Qaida associate who recently cut off the head of Nicholas Berg. But the White House decided not to carry out the attack because, as the story puts it:

"[T]he administration feared [that] destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam."

The implications of this are more shocking, in their way, than the news from Abu Ghraib. Bush promoted the invasion of Iraq as a vital battle in the war on terrorism, a continuation of our response to 9/11. Here was a chance to wipe out a high-ranking terrorist. And Bush didn't take advantage of it because doing so might also wipe out a rationale for invasion.

The story gets worse in its details. As far back as June 2002, U.S. intelligence reported that Zarqawi had set up a weapons lab at Kirma in northern Iraq that was capable of producing ricin and cyanide. The Pentagon drew up an attack plan involving cruise missiles and smart bombs. The White House turned it down. In October 2002, intelligence reported that Zarqawi was preparing to use his bio-weapons in Europe. The Pentagon drew up another attack plan. The White House again demurred. In January 2003, police in London arrested terrorist suspects connected to the camp. The Pentagon devised another attack plan. Again, the White House killed the plan, not Zarqawi.

When the war finally started in March, the camp was attacked early on. But by that time, Zarqawi and his followers had departed.

This camp was in the Kurdish enclave of Iraq. The U.S. military had been mounting airstrikes against various targets throughout Iraq—mainly air-defense sites—for the previous few years. It would not have been a major escalation to destroy this camp, especially after the war against al-Qaida in Afghanistan. The Kurds, whose autonomy had been shielded by U.S. air power since the end of the 1991 war, wouldn't have minded and could even have helped.

But the problem, from Bush's perspective, was that this was the only tangible evidence of terrorists in Iraq. Colin Powell even showed the location of the camp on a map during his famous Feb. 5 briefing at the U.N. Security Council. The camp was in an area of Iraq that Saddam didn't control. But never mind, it was something. To wipe it out ahead of time might lead some people—in Congress, the United Nations, and the American public—to conclude that Saddam's links to terrorists were finished, that maybe the war wasn't necessary. So Bush let it be.

In the two years since the Pentagon's first attack plan, Zarqawi has been linked not just to Berg's execution but, according to NBC, 700 other killings in Iraq. If Bush had carried out that attack back in June 2002, the killings might not have happened. More: The case for war (as the White House feared) might not have seemed so compelling. Indeed, the war itself might not have happened.

One ambiguity does remain. The NBC story reported that "the White House" declined to carry out the airstrikes. Who was "the White House"? If it wasn't George W. Bush—if it was, say, Dick Cheney—then we crash into a very different conclusion: not that Bush was directly culpable, but that he was more out of touch than his most cynical critics have imagined. It's a tossup which is more disturbing: a president who passes up the chance to kill a top-level enemy in the war on terrorism for the sake of pursuing a reckless diversion in Iraq—or a president who leaves a government's most profound decision, the choice of war or peace, to his aides.