Dan wrote:
No, I made it based on his actions and statements concerning the Balkans
immediately after he was elected. A summation of the administrations
attitude is at
http://www.worldpress.org/0901cover3.htm
Bush wasn't interested in nation building....both his statements and his
actions indicated that he thought it was a do-gooder waster of
effort.....before 9-11.
The article seems to be based on statements made by Secretary Powell who,
in retrospect, had about as much influence on the Bush White House as Dan
Rather. Were there any statements by Bush or Rumsfeld or Cheney?
Second, if you dig deeper into the Clarke statements as well as
allegations made by Paul O'Niel, you _will_ find a greater interest in
Iraq than in Al Quaeda/Bin Laden prior to 911.
OK, let me accept that he was more interested in Iraq than AQ. The
number of public statements he made on the dangers of appeasing North
Korea were
significantly greater than the number of public statements made about
Iraq. Yet, I saw no indication that he was preparing the nation for an
invasion
of North Korea.
Know when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em, Dan. Private statements as
reveiled by administration insiders are much more compelling than public
statments.
Third, immediately after 911 you not only have Bush telling Clarke to
find an Iraq connection you have Rumsfeld asking aids to come up with
plans
to strike Iraq _despite_ being told that the terrorists were probably Al
Qaeda and not Iraqi.
How is this inconsistent with him _knowing_ that there must have been a
connection? Why is this evidence that he planned on invading Iraq before
9-11. Why couldn't it just be the perspective that it takes the
resources of a country to mount such an attack....and knowing that
Hussein has
supported other terrorists with cash, him believing that it must have
happened again.
Because it follow that if the projectionn of power into the middle east
and regime change in Iraq were administration priorities (as illustrated
in points 1, 2 and 4), then the administration would be anxious to find an
excuse to invade Iraq.
Well, it was a goal of the Clinton administration to remove Kim from
power. They thought that this would provide an opportunity to defuse the
Korean
crisis. This was after Clinton decided not to bomb the nuclear
facilities. But, he had no plans to invade.
I know that Bush I had the removal of Hussein as a goal of his policy.
Clinton certainly rattled the saber more in 1998 than Bush did pre-9-11.
So if there had been an incident and Clinton had invaded and then it
turned out that the incident had absolutely nothing to do with N. Korea
then Clintons proclivity to unseat Kim would have nothing to do with why
he invaded???
And finally you have the build up to invasion during which intelligence
was manipulated in a manner that promoted the justification for
invasion.
Which does not address what was planned before 9-11.
No, but it is a further indicator of the administrations anxiousness to
invade Iraq.
There were four points that you considered suggesting that the invasion
of Iraq was a priority before 9-11. I didn't consider them thus. I'd be
willing to try to formalize my I also considered negative evidence.
For example, Powell stated that the sanctions were working with Iraq
early in 2001 and that no military action was needed.
Why is it you think that Powell is a good indicator of what the
administration was thinking? Whatever he said had only coincidental
importance to what the ral Bush insiders were thinking.
You quote Richards stating that Bush was more interested in Iraq than AQ.
He also stated that Bush wasn't very interested in AQ....didn't consider
them to be a serious threat. If the Bush administration had Iraq as a
priority, wouldn't Richards, or Wilkerson, or someone have gotten wind of
that pre 9-11?
I assume you mean Richard Clarke? This is from a meeting in April of 2001:
"Clarke relates, "I began saying, 'We have to deal with bin Laden; we have
to deal with al Qaeda.' Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense,
said, 'No, no, no. We don't have to deal with al Qaeda. Why are we talking
about that little guy? We have to talk about Iraqi terrorism against the
United States.'
"And I said, 'Paul, there hasn't been any Iraqi terrorism against the
United States in eight years!' And I turned to the deputy director of the
CIA and said, 'Isn't that right?' And he said, 'Yeah, that's right. There
is no Iraqi terrorism against the United States."
Clarke went on to add, "There's absolutely no evidence that Iraq was
supporting al Qaeda, ever."
And this is Paul O'Niell, the Secretary of the Treasury and a member of
the security council:
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was
a bad person and that he needed to go,” says O’Neill, who adds that going
after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration - eight months
before Sept. 11.
“From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can
do to change this regime,” says Suskind. “Day one, these things were laid
and sealed.”
Indeed, if Bush were planning, before 9-11, wouldn't the first step be to
rattle a saber in order to start the preparations for such a war? Why
didn't we hear some of the speeches about the dangers of Hussein that we
heard after 9-11 before 9-11 if that was his plan all along.
Because they percieved (accurately) that there was no popular support for
such a plan. Maybe they were hoping that a terrorist attack would take
place that they could blame on Iraq?
--
Doug
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
