It's too bad we didn't kill him in 2002...or in 2004...when we had ironclad information about his location. In 2002 not only did we know where he was, but the location was a chemical weapons manufacturing facility where he was personally participating in the production of Rycin and cyanide.

If our government were actually, rather than nominally, interested in pre-emptive strikes to prevent terrorism, we would have toasted him right then and there.

Who pulled the plug on the Pentagon's plan to get him in 2002? Donald Rumsfeld, that's who.

Why?

Because removing him in 2002 may have removed the presumptive reason to attack Iraq at all...Al Z was the only person with connections to Al Qaeda in Iraq in 2002.

Rumsfeld and Bush needed him there, alive and well, as part of the justification to attack...preemptively killing him while he was actually in the process of producing terrorist weapons (our reason for the war, remember?) would have actually interfered with the attack on Iraq.

Rejoice or not, it's a good thing that he is gone, and won't be doing any more harm, and I think there is no question about that.

How many people has he killed since 2002, though...deaths that we could have easily prevented?

What if we killed him in 2002 and then didn't need to go to war with Iraq? (That assumes, of course, that the Bush Administration was being candid when they said that preventing terrorism was the reason for attacking Iraq...any thinking person knows that was, and is, crap.)

How many lives could have been saved by that? How much money? How many of the Congressional seats that the Repubs are poised to lose this fall?

Fish on...

Todd