Zarqawi: manufactured menace.(Abu Musab al-Zarqawi)

In June 2002, Abu-Musab al-Zarqawi, a small-time Jordanian thug who aspired to become a terrorist leader, was comfortably embedded in Kurdish-dominated northern Iraq, an area not under Saddam Hussein's control.

After the war began, U.S. forces attacked the Zarqawi camp in Kirma, but by that time he and his key followers had fled. Why wasn't action taken in a more timely fashion?

In a March 2004 NBC News interview, former National Security Council member Roger Cressey recalled: "People were more obsessed with developing the coalition to overthrow Saddam than to execute the president's policy of preemption against terrorists.... Here's a case where they waited, they waited too long and now they're suffering as a result inside Iraq." According to Cressey, the military's "case for attacking Zarqawi's operation was airtight, but the administration feared destroying the terrorist camp in Iraq could undercut its case for war against Saddam."

By mid-2004, guerrillas connected to Zarqawi had been blamed for the death of at least 700 people. Even so, Zarqawi was not a particularly powerful figure among those leading the various militant and terrorist groups warring in Iraq.

An internal Pentagon document leaked to the Washington Post quotes Col. Derek Harvey, a military intelligence officer who served in Iraq and was a key adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, as saying that Zarqawi's faction and other foreign insurgents ...