A liberal is someone who feels a
great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -- G. Gordon
Liddy
-----Original Message----- From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On
Behalf Of Charles Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 4:04
PM To: 'The Sandbox Discussion List' Subject: RE: [Sndbox]
sounds like sour grapes to me.
Quite probably because the reason they
were emboldened to take the action they did was because they perceived us as
weak.
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of
David Sent: Monday, January 12, 2004 4:58 PM To: 'The
Sandbox Discussion List' Subject: RE: [Sndbox] sounds like sour
grapes to me.
Hmm, wonder if Bush had gone after Saddam from the beginning if
we could have stopped 911?
David L.
A liberal is someone who feels a
great debt to his fellow man, which debt he proposes to pay off with your money. -- G. Gordon
Liddy
-----Original Message----- From:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]On
Behalf Of Charles Sent: Saturday, January 10, 2004 8:25
PM To: 'The Sandbox Discussion List' Subject: [Sndbox]
sounds like sour grapes to me.
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill is the
main source for an upcoming book about the Bush White House,
"The Price of Loyalty." (Photo: CBS)
"From
the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein
was a bad person and that he needed to go." Paul O'Neill
O'Neill was fired by the White House a year ago
for his disagreement on the president's policy on tax cuts.
(Photo: CBS)
(CBS) The Bush Administration began making
plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops,
within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not
eight months later after the 9/11 attacks, as has been previously
reported.
That's what former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill
says in his first interview about his time as a White House insider.
O'Neill talks to CBS News Correspondent Lesley Stahl in the
interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan.
11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"From the very beginning, there was a
conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to
go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that
the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do is a
really huge leap."
O'Neill, fired by the White House for his
disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source for an upcoming book,
"The Price of Loyalty," authored by Ron Suskind.
Suskind says
O'Neill and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him
documents that show that in the first three months of 2001, the
administration was looking at military options for removing Saddam
Hussein from power and planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall
-- including post-war contingencies such as peacekeeping troops, war
crimes tribunals and the future of Iraq's oil.
"There are
memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan
for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document, says Suskind,
titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts," outlines areas
of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors around the world
from...30, 40 countries, and which ones have what intentions on oil in
Iraq," Suskind says.
In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying
he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting
questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "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,'" says O'Neill in the book.
CBS News
Correspondent Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White
House sees it, O'Neill's remarks are those of a disgruntled former
official, and it should not have come as a surprise to O'Neill that
the U.S. advocated Saddam's ouster.
In fact, a senior
administration official tells CBS News it would have been
irresponsible not to plan for Saddam's eventual removal.
As for the charge that there were early plans to invade Iraq,
Knoller says the official calls that "laughable." Suggesting
that O'Neill doesn't know what he's talking about on this matter, the
official told CBS News O'Neill had enough problems in his own
area of expertise, so, "Why should anyone believe he has a credible
understanding of foreign policy?"
Another senior
administration official told CBS News Saturday, "No one ever
listened to the crazy things he said before, why should we start now?"
Separately, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan added
Saturday, "We appreciate his service. While we're not in the business
of book reviews, it appears the world according to Mr O'Neill is more
about justifying his own opinions than looking at the reality of the
results we're achieving on behalf on the American people.
"The
president is going to continue to be forward-looking and focus on
building on the results we've achieved on the economy and efforts to
make the world safer and a better place."
According to CBS
News Reporter Lisa Barron in Baghdad, "The Iraqi National
Congress, an umbrella group of former exiles, says it's not surprised
by O'Neill's remarks. Spokesman Entifadh Qanbar tells CBS News
that the Bush administration opened official channels to the Iraqi
opposition soon after coming to power, and discussed how to remove
Saddam. The group opened an office in Washington shortly afterwards."
Suskind also writes about a White House meeting in which he
says the president seems to be wavering about going forward with his
second round of tax cuts. "Haven't we already given money to rich
people ... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle," Suskind says
the president uttered, according to a nearly verbatim transcript of an
Economic Team meeting he says he obtained from someone at the meeting.
O'Neill, who was asked to resign because of his opposition to
the tax cut, says he doesn't think his tell-all account in this book
will be attacked by his former employers as sour grapes. "I will be
really disappointed if [the White House] reacts that way," he tells
Stahl. "I can't imagine that I am going to be attacked for telling the
truth."
O'Neill also is quoted saying in the book that
President Bush was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like
a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
Also, as saying the
administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top
officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do,
forcing them to act on "little more than hunches about what the
president might think."
"It's revealing," said Stahl on The
Early Show Friday. "I would say it's an unflattering portrait of the
White House and of the president -- and specifically, about how they
make decisions."
A lack of dialogue, according to O'Neill, was
the norm in cabinet meetings he attended. And it was similar in
one-on-one meetings, says O'Neill. Of his first such meeting with the
president, O'Neill says, "I went in with a long list of things to talk
about and, I thought, to engage [him] on...I was surprised it turned
out me talking and the president just listening...It was mostly a
monologue."