In the comments to my post below, commenter Davebo raised the issue of the conscious decision by the Administration not to bomb a terrorist camp strongly believed to house al-Zarqawi.
The camp was in the North of Iraq – in the area under the no-fly zone, and only loosely under Saddam’s control.
Davebo characterized the decision as an effort to use al-Zarqawi’s presence as a rationale for the war. Administration figures characterized it differently:
Another factor, though, was fear that a strike on the camp could stir up opposition while the administration was trying to build an international coalition to launch an invasion of Iraq. Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, said in an interview that the reasons for not striking included “the president’s decision to engage the international community on Iraq.” Mr. Di Rita said the camp was of interest only because it was believed to be producing chemical weapons. He also cited several potential logistical problems in planning a strike, such as getting enough ground troops into the area, and the camp’s large size.
It sounds like they were talking a ground assault, which would have been a meaningful escalation from the air strikes and cruise missile attacks we’d employed in Iraq up until then.
But let’s do something interesting here. Let me put out a call to everyone to pull together links to the best available information about this decision, and the background to it.Before we debate policy, let’s make a good-faith effort to assemble what facts we can. I’m particularly interested in two things – the nature of the proposed assault and reason it wasn’t approved; and why Zarqawi felt it was a good idea to be in Kurdistan in 2002.
I’m going to impose a rule for the next day or so; don’t post a comment here without a link to an outside source on these issues. Once we’ve got a body of links, I’ll put them up in one post, and we’ll discuss the issue in our freewheeling style there. Again, don’t comment unless you’ve got a link to an outside source with information on this. I’ll delete all other comments for now.
*Post title is from a version of Mr. Bojangles – I forget the artist
Background material first…
Might as well start out at the last two paragraphs of the Background section to the Wikipedia article on Ahmad Fadeel al-Nazal al-Khalayleh “al-Zarqawi”. Also see the article on Ansar al-Islam.
From the Weekly Standard: The Rise of Ansar al-Islam: Inside the birth of the Kurdish terrorist organization.. Dan Darling goes into why Kurdistan was seen as a good spot to locate.
Here’s a report from Michael Totten about his trip to Biara, the last place Zarqawi was holed up before the invasion: http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001071.html Interestingly, in the comments dj elliot claims that it was outside the no-fly zone.
Sorry, messed up the link. “Michael Totten’s report on Biara.”:http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001071.html
Ansar al Islam was not in the area of the Northern no-fly zone. The southern border of the zone was the 36th parallel. Ansar al Islam was based near Halabja, more than 50 kilometers south of the 36th parallel.
Here’s a map
It was in PUK controlled area, but they had wrested control of several towns along the border starting back in Aug/Sept 2001. It was a Kurdish Islamist group that had cut a deal with aQ to set up an alternate base in Iraq.
Now starting an air campaign in Iraq while we were still messing with the UN would have opened up a whole new can of worms. To do so for a lesser known aQ member who had escaped the fighting in Afghanistan would have been rather foolish. And that’s all Zarqawi was at the time. He had not yet caused the bloodshed he would. Hindsight is 20/20.
Gabriel Chapman pointed this out in the last thread, but “here”:http://www.marketaccess.org/bio_cressey.asp is the biographical information on Roger W. Cressey who drove this accusation. It turns out Cressey was shunted from the NSC to cybersecurity in November 2001. In other words, it is incorrect to portray Cressey as a first hand source on this story as a member of the National Security Council when the contraversy occurred. At best he was on the outside looking in, and one would assume no happier about it than his boss “Richard Clarke.”:http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0743260244/102-8324898-8437745?v=glance&n=283155
Jerry Jeff Walker…
I’ll try to offer a useful link later.. but Jerry Jeff Walker rocks! And yes, I love that Sangria Wine.
Alright, davebo I’ll let that comment stand – because I’m a Jerry-Jeff fanboy as well. But you owe us two links next time.
“Here’s an interesting comment”:http://iraqinews.com/org_ansar_al-islam.shtml on Ansar al-Islam that I’d like to hear more from people about:
bq. Ansar al-Islam is a radical Kurdish Islamic group that is supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime. This group is located in the pseudo-autonomous Northern Iraq. This group has ties with Taliban and al-Qaeda. It is the most radical group operating in the Iraqi Kurdistan region.
“supportive of Saddam Hussein’s regime”?? What does anyone know about that?
A.L.
Here’s an article supporting the Saddam-Ansar connection from the “Christian Science Monitor”:http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/0402/p01s03-wome.html
bq. One reason they were leery of attracting the attention of fellow Iraqis may have been clandestine support for the Kurdish Islamists from the Baghdad regime. Qassem Hussein Mohamed, a big-boned, mustachioed Saddam lookalike who says he worked for Baghdad’s Mukhabarat intelligence for two decades, says that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein has clandestinely supported Ansar al-Islam for several years.
Interesting, if correct.
A.L.
Cressey currently works with Clarke at their company Safe Harbor.
Their corporate directory reads like a whose-who of Clinton era “security” hacks who also appear as big media “experts”
As I noted in the last discussion, Cressey accustaions should be taken with boulder sized grains of salt. He wears his contempt on his sleeve.
This has some good source articles on the Ansar al Islam ties to Saddam regime. Many source citations are a little lacking in specifics.
Michael O’Hanlon is a scholar at the Brookings Institution and a visiting scholar at Princeton. He is one of the sources in the MSNBC article on the aborted attacks on al-Zarqawi from comment #1. The other source was Roger W. Cressey, Richard Clarke’s little buddy at Good Harbor, as pointed out in #6.
This story of the squandered plans to off al-Zarqawi seems to be a single-source story. I can’t find anything on the net that doesn’t either source Cressey or an unnamed “U.S. intelligence official.”
Side note, interesting year-old (but new to me) paper from Brookings about what to do with states that sort of fight terror, but not really. It poses a way that the war on terror might actually live up to its name, rather than being a war against jihadism. Either way is fine by me, but there are concrete ethical steps that should be taken.
“Jeffrey Goldberg’s New Yorker article about Ansar al Islam and ties to Saddam Hussein.”:http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020325fa_FACT1
This link might be useful BBC. BTW, while the al-Ansar camp was not in the no-fly zone, it was outside the control of Saddam’s regime, and his loss of control was the result of the enforcement of the no-fly zone.