Zarqawi: manufactured menace.

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 constitute "a very small part of the actual numbers" involved in the insurrection. "Our own focus on Zarqawi has enlarged his caricature, if you will--made him more important than he really is, in some ways," admitted Col. Harvey.

Other documents obtained by the paper describe the "Zarqawi PSY-OP"--the latter a term for psychological warfare operations--as "the most successful information campaign to date." Among those targeted by that PSY-OP, according to the Pentagon, was the "home audience" in the United States.

Some Pentagon officials were worried about the damage being done by inflating Zarqawi's image. Months before Zarqawi was killed in a June 8 airstrike, "American military and intelligence officers in Iraq battled Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the White House to 'degrade' the terrorist's dramatically inflated image, while Rumsfeld and the White House resisted, ultimately for 'domestic political reasons,' as a military source involved in this internal controversy told me," reported Sidney Blumenthal in the June 15 issue of Salon. "In the end, the military lost"--and the hype surrounding Zarqawi lasted long enough for the White House to spin his death into a major global triumph.