Though U.S. intelligence knew that the secular Sunni Saddam Hussein was a bitter enemy of these Islamic fundamentalists, the Bush administration exploited for propaganda purposes the fact that Zarqawi was located inside Iraq and had slipped into Baghdad for some medical treatment.
In his memoir, Bush cites the Zarqawi case to defend his decision to invade, but it's unclear whether the existence of the known terrorist in Iraq was also used to bait Bush.
"In the summer of 2002, I received a startling piece of news. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, an al Qaedaaffiliated terrorist who had experimented with biological weapons in Afghanistan, was operating a lab in northeastern Iraq.
""Suspect facility in this area may be producing poisons and toxins for terrorist use,' the briefing read. "Al-Zarqawi is an active terrorist planner who has targeted U.S. and Israeli interests: Sensitive reporting from a [classified] service indicates that al-Zarqawi has been directing efforts to smuggle an unspecified chemical material originating in northern Iraq into the United States.'
"We couldn't say for sure whether Saddam knew Zarqawi was in Iraq. We did have intelligence indicating that Zarqawi had spent two months in Baghdad receiving medical treatment and that other al Qaeda operatives had moved to Iraq.
"The CIA had worked with a major Arab intelligence service to get Saddam to find and extradite Zarqawi. He refused." [It was later revealed that Saddam Hussein's police had searched for Zarqawi in Baghdad but failed to locate him.]
At another point in the memoir, Bush portrays himself as something of an innocent victim, deceived by erroneous intelligence in late 2002. He wrote:
"I asked George Tenet and his capable deputy, John McLaughlin, to brief me on what intelligence we could declassify to explain Iraq's WMD programs. A few days before Christmas, John walked me through their first effort. It was not very convincing.
"I thought back to CIA briefings I had received, the NIE that concluded Saddam had biological and chemical weapons, and the data the CIA had provided for my UN speech in September. "Surely we can do a better job of explaining the evidence against Saddam,' I said. George Tenet agreed. "It's a slam dunk,' he said.
"I believed him. I had been receiving intelligence briefings on Iraq for nearly two years."
No More Delays
By March 2003, Bush claims he had exhausted all peaceful efforts to resolve the issues regarding Iraq's WMD and was left with only one choice, to invade Iraq:
"For more than a year, I had tried to address the threat from Saddam Hussein without war. We had rallied an international coalition to pressure him to come clean about his weapons of mass destruction programs. We had obtained a unanimous United Nations Security Council resolution making clear there would be serious consequences for continued defiance.
"We had reached out to Arab nations about taking Saddam into exile. I had given Saddam and his sons a final forty-eight hours to avoid war. The dictator rejected every opportunity. The only logical conclusion was that he had something to hide, something so important that he was willing to go to war for it."
Of course, the other logical conclusion would be that Iraq had no WMD stockpiles, that it had done its best to convince the outside world of that fact, and that it trusted that the international community would uphold the principles enshrined at the post-World War II Nuremberg Tribunals and in the UN Charter, making aggressive war the supreme international crime.
Instead, recognizing that the Security Council was overwhelmingly opposed to an invasion, Bush withdrew a second resolution seeking explicit authorization to use force, got the UN inspectors to flee Iraq, and turned to his "coalition of the willing.".
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