Why Did George W. Bush Invade Iraq?

by: Dean Barker

Mon Sep 07, 2009 at 08:22:25 AM EDT

Our military might was diverted from killing or capturing bin Laden in order to invade a country that had nothing to do with him, and also had no weapons of mass destruction. As a result, thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis had their lives ended prematurely. (I'll leave aside, for the moment, the attendant damage to our reputation and national security resulting from the invasion.)

To date, no one has been held accountable for this perversion of our traditional American values of restraint abroad and defensive war.

I think it is important, as we enter this period of New McCarthyism on those reasonable people who sought answers to George W. Bush's foreign policy, to remind ourselves of this question.  Because too many lives have been destroyed for it to be swept into the dustbin of history, unanswered.

The statements (below the fold) of two members of George W. Bush's cabinet, I think, are a good place to start:

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.

...As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

"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. "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."

And that came up at this first meeting, says O'Neill, who adds that the discussion of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two days later.

He got briefing materials under this cover sheet. "There are memos. One of them marked, secret, says, 'Plan for post-Saddam Iraq,'" adds Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January and February of 2001.

Richard Clarke, national coordinator for security and counterterrorism under Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush:

The first response they discussed [after 9/11] was invading Iraq. While the Pentagon was still burning, Secretary of Defense Don Rumsfeld was in the White House suggesting an attack against Baghdad. Somehow the administration's leaders could not believe that al-Qaeda could have mounted such a devastating operation, so Iraqi involvement became the convenient explanation. Despite being told repeatedly that Iraq was not involved in 9/11, some, like Cheney, could not abandon the idea. Charles Duelfer of the CIA's Iraq Survey Group recently revealed in his book,  "Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq," that high-level U.S. officials urged him to consider waterboarding specific Iraqi prisoners of war so that they could provide evidence of an Iraqi role in the terrorist attacks -- a request Duelfer refused. (A recent report indicates that the suggestion came from the vice president's office.) Nevertheless, the lack of evidence did not deter the administration from eventually invading Iraq -- a move many senior Bush officials had wanted to make before 9/11.