[News] Bush was demanding excuse to invade Iraq in January 2001, says ex-treasury secretary

[News at freedomarchives.org]

Bush was demanding excuse to invade Iraq in January 2001, says ex-treasury 
secretary

http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=480363&host=3&dir=70



By Andrew Gumbel, in Los Angeles




12 January 2004

The Bush administration started making detailed plans for the invasion of 
Iraq within days of coming to office, with the President himself anxious to 
find a pretext to overthrow Saddam Hussein, a high-ranking former cabinet 
member said yesterday.

The revelation is the latest in a string of potential embarrassments for 
the White House offered by the former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, who 
has gone on the record for a new book looking at his bumpy two years at the 
centre of US power, The Price of Loyalty.

Mr O'Neill said invading Iraq was "topic A" at the very first meeting of 
President George Bush's National Security Council, 10 days after his 
inauguration on 20 January 2001, and continued to be an abiding theme in 
follow-up meetings.

"From the very first instance, it was about Iraq," said Mr O'Neill, who was 
a participant in all the meetings and provided voluminous minutes and other 
documents to the book's author, Ron Suskind. "It was all about finding a 
way to do it. That was the tone of it. The President saying 'Go find me a 
way to do this'."

Mr O'Neill is the first cabinet member to implicate directly Mr Bush in 
planning a war against Iraq so early in his presidency. One of the 
documents passed to Mr Suskind was a secret dossier from the first few 
weeks of the administration entitled "Plan for post-Saddam Iraq". The 
disclosure will provide further ammunition for to Bush critics who believe 
the administration cynically exploited the 11 September terror attacks to 
launch an aggressive policy of global military interventionism that 
neo-conservative hawks such as Dick Cheney, the Vice-President, and Donald 
Rumsfeld, the Defence Secretary, had been advocating for years.

It makes clear that hints of a link between Saddam and the 11 September 
attacks, repeatedly made by administration officials in the run-up to the 
war but never substantiated, were a political convenience, not the driving 
motivation behind the invasion. And it also poses a considerable challenge 
to the official version of history, which has sought to portray Mr Bush as 
undergoing a near-religious conversion after 11 September from a meek 
peacetime leader to a man with a global mission to stamp out evil.

Mr O'Neill, who spoke to CBS's60 Minutes news programme yesterday, said he 
was surprised nobody at the NSC meetings asked questions such as "Why 
Saddam?" or "Why now?" "For me," he added, "the notion of pre-emption, that 
the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is really a 
huge leap."

It has been clear for some time that the neo-conservatives in the 
administration were pushing such unilateralism. Mr Bush came to office 
pledging the opposite - an aversion to so-called "nation-building" and the 
commitment of US troops to world trouble-spots.

The former treasury secretary gives a unflattering portrait of the 
President in the book and in follow-up interviews, describing him as 
disengaged from the issues and apparently uninterested in dialogue with 
advisers. In cabinet meetings, Mr O'Neill said, the President was "like a 
blind man in a roomful of deaf people" - having nothing to say and allowing 
others to fix the agenda.
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