George W. Bush ALWAYS Planned To Invade Iraq

[McCamy Taylor]

Karl Rove’s latest attempt to rewrite history provides an excellent opportunity to review the events that put our nation in its longest and costly war. Hint: WMDs had nothing to do with it. When they write this one up in the history books, some of the key events and players will be….

I. The NeoCons and Project for the New American Century

Note that the NeoCons date all the way back to the 1970s and Democratic Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson, the Senator from Boeing. That is how long they have been plotting to win U.S. energy independence by stealing the nationalized oil of Middle Eastern states. You know, the old fashioned Standard Oil way. They did not find any suckers with a figurehead politician in possession of a name familiar enough to voters to be elected president until they stumbled upon George W. Bush.

From Wikipedia:

The goal of regime change remained their consistent position throughout the Iraq disarmament crisis.<5> ….On November 16, 1998, citing Iraq's demand for the expulsion of UN weapons inspectors and the removal of Richard Butler as head of the inspections regime, William Kristol, co-founder of the PNAC and editor of The Weekly Standard, called again for regime change in an editorial in his online magazine: "...any sustained bombing and missile campaign against Iraq should be part of any overall political-military strategy aimed at removing Saddam from power."<7> Kristol states that Paul Wolfowitz and others believed that the goal was to create "a 'liberated zone' in southern Iraq that would provide a safe haven where opponents of Saddam could rally and organize a credible alternative to the present regime ... The liberated zone would have to be protected by U.S. military might, both from the air and, if necessary, on the ground."
From 2001 through 2002, the co-founders and other members of the PNAC published articles supporting the United States' invasion of Iraq.<10>. On its website, the PNAC promoted its point of view that leaving Saddam Hussein in power would be "surrender to terrorism."<11><12><13><14>
On September 20, 2001 (nine days after the September 11, 2001 attacks), the PNAC sent a letter to President George W. Bush, advocating "a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq," or regime change:

...even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack, any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq. Failure to undertake such an effort will constitute an early and perhaps decisive surrender in the war on international terrorism.

The group published a position paper in 2000 in which it recommended that the U.S. stage wars on multiple fronts across the world but most especially in Iraq. They envisioned this as an ongoing occupation, with the purpose of harassing Iran.

Commentators from divergent parts of the political spectrum––such as Democracy Now! and American Free Press, including Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Jody Williams and former Republican Congressmen Pete McCloskey and Paul Findley––have voiced their concerns about the influence of the PNAC on the decision by President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.<45><46> Some have regarded the PNAC's January 16, 1998 letter to President Clinton, which urged him to embrace a plan for "the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power,"<19> and the large number of members of PNAC appointed to the Bush administration as evidence that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a foregone conclusion. <37><41><47>
snip
Media commentators have found it significant that signatories to the PNAC's January 16, 1998 letter to President Clinton (and some of its other position papers, letters, and reports) include such Bush administration officials as Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, John Bolton, Richard Armitage, and Elliott Abrams.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_Century

Note that Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush, and Scooter Libby signed the 2000 document which called for an invasion and occupation of Iraq. In other words, the war was never meant to be a quick in and out operation. It was originally conceived as a long term venture, designed to allow the U.S. a military base in the Middle East. W., not being part of the club, may not have realized this. Dick Cheney and everyone else in his administration certainly knew the truth.

II. Bush: “History. We don’t know. We’ll all be dead.”

Bush’s Brain does not know Bush very well. W. wanted to invade Iraq even before day one.

1999: Bush was thinking about invading Iraq while he was running for president.

Houston: Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.
“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

http://www.gnn.tv/articles/article.php?id=761

January 2001 : Bush was thinking about invading Iraq while his wife was putting up the new curtains in the White House.

And what happened at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.

“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.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/01/09/60minutes/main592330.shtml

The report goes on to say that the occupation of Iraq was planned in January 2001.

Um, Karl, did you have the WMD evidence all sewn up by then?

Dec. 2001: According to Bob Woodward and the Washington Post, Donald Rumsfeld was not the only one who seized upon 9/11 as an excuse to target Iraq.

Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A17347-2004Apr16.html

With the Enron collapse scandal unfolding around them, I can see why Bush and Rove might have wanted to distract the country with something a little bit more patriotic. Had the nation been given a chance to realize that Rove helped to appoint the members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission who looked the other way while Enron price gouged California (and Cheney mocked the state’s consumers), the nation’s voters might have been pretty mad come the 2002 midterm elections. Plus, we all know that W. wanted to be a real boy



Oops. I mean a real Commander-in-chief.

[OmmmSweetOmmm]

1. Thank you for all your hard work and mentioning PNAC. I would think at least

98% of DUers know that Shrub had intended to invade all along.

In the first cabinet meeting, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill said it was mentioned.

[Skittles]

2. of course he did

which makes any vote for IWR even more disgusting

[JohnyCanuck]

3. Scott Ritter: For Bush - and Obama - a gut check

George Bush says the failure to find WMD in Iraq is his biggest regret. He should regret trusting his gut over the intelligence.

snip


Bush, in his revealing interview, claimed he wished "that the intelligence had been different", but that was never really the point. Bush, like so many others, had made up his mind regarding Saddam independent of the facts of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Try as he might to spread responsibility for his actions by pointing out that "a lot of people put their reputations on the line and said the weapons of mass destruction is a reason to remove Saddam Hussein," the fact is WMD was simply an excuse used by the president to fulfil his self-proclaimed destiny as a war-time president who would avenge his father's inability (or, more accurately, sage unwillingness) to finish the job back in 1991, in the aftermath of the first Gulf war.

As pre-war British government discussions with Bush administration officials reveal, there was never a solid case to be made on Iraq's possession of WMD in the months leading up to the decision to invade, simply a sophomoric cause-effect relationship linking regime change (the preferred policy) and WMD (the excuse) "in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD" (quoting Blair).

The intelligence on Iraq's WMD was whatever the president and his cronies (including his erstwhile ally at 10 Downing Street) wanted it to be. Over seven years of UN-mandated weapons inspection activity, conducted from 1991 until 1998, had produced a well-defined (and documented) record of disarmament which, while not providing absolute verification of the disposition of every aspect of Saddam's WMD programmes, did allow any observer interested in the facts to ascertain that Iraq was fundamentally disarmed from a qualitative perspective. This, coupled with the presence of the world's most technologically advanced and intrusive arms control regime monitoring the totality of Iraq's industrial infrastructure, provided a high degree of confidence that Saddam had neither retained nor reconstituted his WMD programme.

snip

I and others did our very best to highlight the factual vacuum in which Bush and Blair operated while making their case for war, but to no avail. The decision to invade had been made months before the UN weapons inspectors returned to Iraq. Their work, and the intelligence they provided, was not only ignored, but indeed was never relevant to the larger issue, centred as it was on regime change, not disarmament.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/dec/02/george-bush-iraq-wmd

[judasdisney]

13. Scott Ritter would be included on a REAL "team-of-rivals"

[Big Blue Marble]

4. Thank you for keeping this front and center.

In his not well known interview in 1999, he discusses the political advantages of being at war:

"Houston: Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

“He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.’ He said, ‘If I have a chance to invade….if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”

Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father’s shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. “Suddenly, he’s at 91 percent in the polls, and he’d barely crawled out of the bunker.”

That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work – and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war – has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush’s unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters – well before he became president. "

http://www.russbaker.com/Guerrilla%20News%20Network%20-%20Bush.htm">Link

[D-Lee]

5. Thanks for another great post!

You echo my thoughts through the years ...

[bdamomma]

6. I wish we could arrest him when he leaves the WH.

[spanone]

7. p n a c

[unblock]

8. personally, i think he decided to invade iraq himself the day poppy called off the first iraq war.

shrub wanted to "get" saddam and i think he blamed his father and james baker for stopping short of completing what shrub thought was the real mission.

the timing is right, this is about when he "sobered up" and set about finagling a resume for himself that would look more presidential.

i mean, what ELSE are we to think his driving purpose in seeking the presidency was?

[The_Casual_Observer]

9. It's insidious. But completely expected.

He was bobbing & weaving his way through rationalizations for the Iraq war starting in 2002. Let's face it, the final decision to invade was made sometime in 2002, with the
invasion planned for the cooler months of 2003. No amount of contrary data or opinion
was going to stop them. Whenever Saddam met their conditions, they would just raise the bar, till the final condition was for Saddam & family to seek asylum in a foreign country in 24 hours time or the bombs would fall.

It's the ultimate tragedy of this thing that on top of everything else they are trying to change the basic history of it.

[pleah]

10. Arrest, convict, imprison! K&R n/t

[Overseas]

11. K&R because I was outraged by Rove and Hughes trying to revise history.

Thanks for showing how very far back Bush Cheney intentions go.

[demigoddess]

12. one thing all those idiots forgot: a war on many nations(even two) can bankrupt

a country and use up the military personnel and use up a heck of a lot of those oil resources that they want. Not to even mention the reparations that might be called for later and that it is patently illegal to invade another country just because you may want to That is what all those rules at the end of WWII were all about.

[old mark]

14. All these lives are disrupted, all the treasure wasted

because of one insecure idiot's desire for revenge of what he saw as a slight to his father.
I have always believed Iraq was invaded by Bush the Second to get Saddam Hussein for surviving the first gulf war and defying Bush the First.

W. has killed and maimed many people and nearly destroyed 2 nations for ego gratification.

He should be in prison.


mark

[TacticalPeek]

15. Don't forget Operation Desert Badger.

They want everybody to forget Operation Desert Badger.

Operation Desert Badger;
Bush's Failed Plan to Instigate an Early Iraq War

by Rob Kall

OpEdNews.Com

That's what CNN reports the White house called it's plan to go nuts on Iraq with massive counter-attacks if a US plane was shot down. This was put into effect after 911. At the time of this writing, the search term "desert badger" does not show up in google news. Desert Badger was the name for the contingency plan the White house laid out in its baiting game, back when the US and the UK were daily flying dozen to 100+ flights over Iraq, attacking various targets, daily. It is obvious that Bush and Rumsfeld and the neocon nincompoops must have been highly disappointed that Saddam never gave them the response they were seeking... so they could unleash the massive retaliatory attack these chickenhawks were fantasizing. (There is a brief mention on the web, in a general google search, of Desert Badger, cited at http://www.tbrnews.org/Archives/a801.htm which reverts to a mention in a no longer active link in the washington post on Jan. 13, 2004.)

http://www.opednews.com/kall033104_desert_badger.htm

[Octafish]

16. Bush's old business partner sure helped out selling the PNAC warplan.

When oil was $150 a barrel they were SO happy.

Why would Osama bin Laden want to kill Dubya, his former business partner?

Thank you for another outstanding post, McCamy Taylor. The truth hurts traitors.

[malaise]

17. Don't forget Gramps in all of this

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/01/mccain-falsely-linked-ira_n_131069.html
<snip>
Of the many false arguments deployed by the Bush Administration to justify war with Iraq, perhaps the most blatant was the completely untrue idea that Iraq was linked to 9/11.

Over the years, Dick Cheney has absorbed most of the criticism for making the false Iraq-9/11 link, thanks primarily to his December 9, 2001 appearance on Meet The Press in which he alleged that 9/11 hijacker Muhammad Atta had met with Iraqi intelligence officials in Prague.

There was no such meeting -- Cheney's claim was totally unsubstantiated fear mongering.

But the striking thing about all this is that when Cheney made his false claim, John McCain had already made the same baseless assertion in an interview on ABC News Nightline conducted on November 28, 2001.

That's right: John McCain falsely linked Iraq to 9/11 nearly two weeks before Dick Cheney. That means Cheney was repeating McCain's false claim -- not the other way around. Here's video:

[MiniMe]

18. Since he lies so much, the nose seems to be way too short

[Gregorian]

19. Listening to his 2000 campaign speech,

I saw this the other day. It was 2000. There was a much younger looking Bush talking about how if terrorists struck America he'd make sure they regretted it beyond anything they'd ever known.

Oh really?

It was rather odd to hear these words since terrorism was not something people talked about. And it became just that more obvious while hearing it what his future intentions might be.

Those with power rarely answer for the abuse of that power. But I want to start a new world of justice. One that is unbiased and just.

[McCamy Taylor]

20. After the Oklahoma City bombing, the conservatives wanted to bomb Iraq.

As if Middle Eastern terrorists had ever heard of Oklahoma City or would stage an attack on the anniversary of the Branch Davidian Compound disaster. One prominent conservative editorial writer in Fort Worth even wrote calling for an attack on Iraq. The po who pulled over McVeigh put a serious crimp in their plans. They have been scheming for this for years.

[Gregorian]

21. I remember that all too well.

But it just donned on me after you posted it. The context in which it may very well have played out even back then.

ARGH! I'm so angry about this. God damnit. Little Iraqi children, wandering, without parents, injured, no water, no electricity. Oh things are getting better there. But this is going on twenty years!

And then there's depleted Uranium with a 4.5 billion year half-life.

Thanks for the reminder. And sorry about exposing my raw emotions.

[elleng]

22. Wes Clark discussed it as 'history' in one of his books;

sorry I don't have quote available.