Joshua Marshall at Talking Points has an informative post about the nbc story on the Zarqawi raid that the White House is said to have quashed because it would have supposedly diluted their case for war.

MSNBC: before the war in Iraq, the Bush administration had several chances to wipe out the operation of Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian militant with ties to al-Qaida, now blamed for more than 700 terrorist killings in Iraq -- but decided against it.

Three different times, the Pentagon drafted plans to strike Zarqawi and his network, but the White House was set on its path to wage war against Saddam Hussein and refused