Forgive my cynicism, but after literally dozens of stories that ought to have led to Bush’s impeachment and jailing for a litany of felonies, the news that former Secretary of the Treasury Paul O’Neill is going on “60 Minutes” to say that Bush wanted to take out Saddam way before 9/11 looks like nothing more than the latest titillating bit of scandal. What the hell is wrong with we Americans that we take this kind of thing lying down, with a shrug and a glance at the bartender for another Rolling Rock?
OK, some highlights:
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill contends the United States began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq just days after President Bush took office in January 2001 — more than two years before the start of the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam Hussein.
“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’s “60 Minutes” in an interview to be aired Sunday night.
The official American government stance on Iraq, dating to the Clinton administration, was that the United States sought to oust Saddam.
But O’Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, said he had qualms about what he asserted was the pre-emptive nature of the war planning.
“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,” according to an excerpt of the interview that CBS released Saturday.
The administration has not found evidence that the Iraqi leader was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but officials have said they had to consider the possibility that Saddam could have undertaken an even larger scale-strike against the United States.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush’s term. But, he said, Saddam “was a threat to peace and stability before September 11th, and even more of a threat after September 11.”
Of course, the Bushists were entitled to their opinion about Saddam. (It was an incorrect opinion, of course–many other countries were rules by far worse dictatorships and several presented far more dangerous threats to the United States than Iraq.) What’s galling here, and it seems almost pedantic to have to say it because it’s so friggin’ obvious, is that they lied to us about their intentions.
Had Bush and his gangbanging thugs run in the 2000 campaign on the we’re-going-after-Saddam platform, we might have been able to decide whether we wanted our foreign policy to make such a radical right turn. Once he assumed office, they should have told us that attacking Iraq would be their top priority–but they didn’t. Truth is, they didn’t think their Iraq policy was popular–so they hid it from us until they could disseminate enough lies to fool us into going along. That’s criminal behavior on the part of people who work for us, not the other way around, remember?
Disgusting.
