Bush was demanding excuse to invade Iraq in January 2001, says
ex-treasury secretary
12 January 2004
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/story.jsp?story=480363
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."
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