Why did the Bush administration leave Zarqawi alive?

This is the same question asked earlier about Osama bin Laden, and the answer is the same. They needed Zarqawi alive as a threat to excuse the invasion of Iraq. This is from Trey Ellis and posted at The Huffington Post.

The evidence of the administration’s folly is iron clad. As NBC reported back in March of 2004 military planners had drawn up plans to take out Zarqawi at least three separate times before the start of the war but Condoleezza Rice and the National Security Council consistently vetoed that action. Now I know Ms. Rice a bit. She was one of my advisors on a college panel I was on at Stanford. I found her charming and understanding. Yet her blindness to Al Qaeda’s plans to hijack an airliner despite bold-type warnings in her briefings, and then her and her administration’s actually scrapping plans to take out Zarqawi when they could amount to lethal blunders (or worse) of historic proportion.

Long before the invasion we knew that Zarqawi was actively producing deadly batches of ricin for planned attacks in Europe yet we did nothing. Looking at the evidence the inescapable conclusion is that this administration actually wanted Zarqawi to be in business because he was nominally on Iraqi soil and tangentially associated with Osama bin Laden. His existence was their only link between Saddam and Al Qaeda and the Bush Administration knew then and we all know now that that link was a lie. I say only nominally on Iraqi soil because his bases were in the Kurdish-controlled no-fly-zone. Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and our own Special Forces (doing recon for the coming war) ruled that area, not Saddam. When Colin Powell so infamously showed the U.N. and the world satellite imagery of the Ansar al-Islam training camps on February 5th, 2003, he conveniently failed to mention this fact. He also failed to mention what he must also have known: that Zarqawi saw himself as a rival to bin Laden (he’s even more radical if you can believe that. Bin Laden doesn’t generally slaughter other Muslims but to Zarqawi the only good Shi’a is a dead Shi’a) and only after the invasion did he decide to join forces and change his outfit’s name.

Consider that together with the following items:

• Able-Danger was shut down in February 2001 by Cheney and Rice after identifying Mohammed Atta as a member of al Qaeda. [Allowed the 9/11 attack to occur.]
• The security problems at two of the airports used on 9/11 were known and the idea that al Qaeda was considering hijacking commercial airplane to crash into American landmarks was known. [Allowed the 9/11 attack to occur.]
• Bush and Tommy Franks appear to have let Osama bin Laden escape at Tora Bora. [Left Osama bin Laden free to act as further threat against the U.S.]
• We know Bush wanted the war in Iraq before he took office in 2001. Here is the story on Why Bush wanted the war in Iraq . [Real motivation for the war.]

The following items relate to the revelations from the Downing Street Memos in which the British security chief told Blair that the decision to invade Iraq had already been made in Washington, and the Intelligence was being cooked to support that decision.

• Who got us into the Iraq mess? And why?
• The Brits knew the al Queda-Iraq connection was a crock.
• Why is Congress becoming more involved in the Downing Street Memos?
• Blair had agreed to join Iraq war in July 2002.
• Bush, Blair deny truth of DSM; NETWORK TV.

It looks extremely likely that Bush, Cheney and Rice had a concerted plan to invade Iraq, and may well have known 9/11 was likely. They did nothing to prevent it, and may have stopped efforts that would have prevented it. Then they let both bin Laden and al Zarqawi escape so that there would continue to be greater threat against the U.S. to encourage support for the invasion of Iraq.

No, the smoking gun is not yet evident. But the preponderance of evidence sure points that way.