In a 60 Minutes interview to be aired tomorrow, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill alleges that the Bush administration planned the invasion of Iraq in early 2001:

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS, according to excerpts released Saturday by the network. "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." ...

In the book, O'Neill is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security Council meeting asked 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,'" O'Neill said.

Of course, this being an election year, Democrats have something to say about this:

"I've always said the president had failed to make the case to go to war with Iraq," Dean said. "My Democratic opponents reached a different conclusion, and in the process, they failed to ask the difficult questions. Now, after the fact, we are learning new information about the true circumstances of the Bush administration's push for war, this time, by one of his former Cabinet secretaries.

"The country deserves to know -- and the president needs to answer -- why the American people were presented with misleading or manufactured intelligence as to why going to war with Iraq was necessary."

Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts also issued a statement. In 2002, Kerry voted to support a resolution giving Bush authority to wage war against Iraq if it didn't dismantle its presumed illegal weapons program.

"These are very serious charges. It would mean [Bush administration officials] were dead-set on going to war alone since almost the day they took office and deliberately lied to the American people, Congress, and the world," Kerry said. "It would mean that for purely ideological reasons they planned on putting American troops in a shooting gallery, occupying an Arab country almost alone. The White House needs to answer these charges truthfully because they threaten to shatter [its] already damaged credibility as never before."

What a lot of heat and smoke where there's no fire. Of course the Bush administration had a plan to invade Iraq in 2001; it had a significant portion of its armed forces attempting to control Iraq's northern and southern areas. Remember the no-fly zones? Congress had passed a resolution in 1998 proclaiming that the official US policy towards Iraq was "regime change." Iraq had refused to cooperate with arms inspectors and were in material breach of a string of UN resolutions. Saddam had also abrogated the terms of the cease-fire that ended armed conflict in Iraq and Kuwait in 1991. Even prior to 2001, if Clinton didn't have an invasion plan for Iraq, he would have been a fool.

Instead, Bush had a plan, and the Democrats scream because of it. Bush planned for post-war Iraq, and the Democrats howl about exploitation and lies. (Remember when the Democrats screamed that Bush had no plan?) In the event, Bush didn't invade Iraq in 2001 or in 2002. He went to Congress in 2002 to challenge them to rid the US of this decade-old albatross, one way or the other. Bush then went to the UN twice, trying to get them to enforce their own resolutions, based on the same intelligence that convinced Bill Clinton the Iraqis were lying. Bush didn't hide what he was doing, nor did his actions do anything but support the Congressionally proclaimed American foreign-policy objective of regime change in Iraq.

We elect Presidents to think strategically and act to defend and protect the US. Any President who didn't have a plan for an Iraq invasion in the past twelve years would have been derelict in his duty. Rather than gasp with horror, we should ask why it took the US twelve long years, wasting tens of billions of dollars, to resolve the Iraqi crisis.

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» O'NEILL ON BUSH'S PLAN TO INVADE IRAQ from Patterico's Pontifications
Paul O'Neill says the Bush Administration had a plan for invading Iraq before 9/11. Big whoop. We have plans to invade everywhere. We probably have a military plan to invade Canada. (Now that I say that out loud, it sounds... [Read More]

Tracked on January 11, 2004 1:35 AM

» The price of dishonesty from PunditFilter
John Hinderaker lays out the evidence of a Suskind/O'Neill hoax (also read the Deacon's post on O'Neill from yesterday). Much of the blogosphere seems baffled at the media attention O'Neill is receiving - see Betsy Newmark, Dustin Frelich, Free Speech'... [Read More]

Tracked on January 12, 2004 7:28 PM

» The price of dishonesty from PunditFilter
John Hinderaker lays out the evidence of a Suskind/O'Neill hoax (also read the Deacon's post on O'Neill from yesterday). Much of the blogosphere seems baffled at the media attention O'Neill is receiving - see Betsy Newmark, Dustin Frelich, Free Speech'... [Read More]

Tracked on January 12, 2004 7:30 PM