The Mess Tent Bombing

Okay, so the best information available seems to be that the attack on the mess tent outside Mosul was carried out by Ansar al-Sunnah Army.

Ansar al-Sunnah Army is apparently an outgrowth of (and shares some personnel with) Ansar al-Islam, the group that Powell cited as part of the justification for the invasion as they were supposedly producing ricin at a camp in the Kurdish north, under the U.S. enforced No Fly Zone.

In spite of these (spurious) claims and the complete vulnerability of Ansar al-Islam to air attack, the U.S. did not attack them before the invasion, very possibly to avoid removing one of the wobbly props under the rationale for war.

Did the political decision to leave Ansar al-Islam unmolested lead more-or-less directly to the mess tent bombing??

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