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Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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January 14, 2004
NEWSFLASH: Iraq was American enemy even before 9-11!
These supposed Bush scandals are really getting to be pretty thin gruel. THEY are trying to conjure one up out of this book sort of by his former treasury secretary Paul O'Neill. This comes even though O'Neill himself is disavowing what Bush critics want to say he was supposedly implying.
For example, a Mr. Richard Feder of Fort Lee, NJ writes me:
Watch the Republicans panic!
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". . .Bush made a strong defense of his Iraq policy on Monday, while some of the Democratic presidential candidates weighed in, saying Bush had misled the American public.
"The decision I made is the right one for America and for the world," Bush said when asked about the book during a press conference at the Summit of the Americas in Monterrey, Mexico.
Asked specifically whether O'Neill was correct in saying that planning for the war had begun far ahead of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Bush said that when he had become president he had inherited a policy of "regime change" from former President Clinton and had decided to adopt it as his own.
"So we were fashioning policy along those lines and then all of a sudden Sept. 11 hit," he said.
[Warning: Ad hominem attack ]Republican supporters of Bush aimed their fire at O'Neill, contending that his comments showed the grudge he held against Bush for the president's decision to fire him for fighting against a new round of tax cuts.
"Mr. O'Neill is now as bitter as he was ineffective when he served as treasury secretary," said Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio.. . ."
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The poopy-lickin' Rep. Ney can only resort to ad hominems, in defense of Bush. And notice Bush's Sir Humphrey Appleby-style non-responsiveness/changing the subject: Clinton MIGHT have had a "regime-change" policy, but "regime-change policy" does not necessarily imply a military invasion! The "inherited" Clinton policy was NOT "unilateral non-U.N. supported military invasion". The policy inherited from Clinton was one stressing inspections.
Bush wants to imply that his policy was really no different in essence, from Clinton's. That Clinton discussed regime-change as a contingency, is certainly true: But "discussions of contingencies" is not the same as official "policy", now is it?
We certainly have many, many contingency plans on the books, which don't constitute official "policy". Sir Humphrey could certainly produce minutes of Security counsel meetings where Clinton and his staff discussed the CONTINGENCY plan: "What if we just have to flat-out go all out and just take this bastard Saddam out?"
Since O 'Neil was on the NSC, as Treasury secretary, he would know, when he says he saw no evidence of WMD's.
I wonder how Rush and others are going to "spin" their way out of this?
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Al rolls his eyes and sighs like his more famous fellow Al, and says:
Yes, yes. Naturally you go on endlessly about ad hominem attacks, though your own crap here is obviously based on bitter personal hatred. You're clearly far more interested in spiting this man than in considering the defense needs of the country.
I am less than impressed with O'Neill's revelations. I haven't read the book, nor do I particularly care enough to do so. It doesn't sound like anything interesting.
However, before you even START to treat his comments on Iraq as some scandal you'd need to get into just exactly what kind of plans W had for Iraq before 9-11. Were they just putting together contingency plans for how you might go about invading if Hussein came pushing his shit again?
Did they supposedly have some date, some specific plans to actually DO it? You would only MAYBE start to have something scandalous if he were hatching some covert plot to major military action without congressional approval. I have seen nothing suggesting that O'Neill is even hinting at claiming any such a thing.
And how much of that stuff would the treasury secretary even know about? They might be mentioning some general idea of contingency plans in full cabinet meetings, but if they were seriously contemplating actually DOING it- putting it on the schedule- I imagine that this would be considerably more secretive.
The idea that such a thing was being seriously contemplated does not strike me as being out of line. Regime change was the officially voted on policy of the US Congress, voted on publicly and broadcast across C-Span years before W came to office. Is it somehow scandalous or bad - as you seem to imply - that he was considering just how we would have to go about it?
I find it a small POSITIVE mark for the president to hear that he was seriously considering outing Saddam before 9-11. This suggests to me that he was not in fact just asleep at the switch when we got hit. He was apparently already seriously thinking about the seriousness of the bad guys in the rat's nest that is that part of the world, rather than just sitting there with his penis in hand.
As a responsible adult, W was assessing the troubling but possibly necessary parameters of dealing with a dangerous enemy. He was considering how to seriously deal with problems rather than just reactively throwing a minor, largely cosmetic military action at immediate PR problems while kicking the actual serious problems down the road.
This incident tends to suggest that the president was not just careening blindly when disaster hit, but had been making at least the beginning of thinking through how to go about getting a handle on the Middle East.
He was thinking through what would specifically be involved in actually doing something to deal with a big, huge problem and its many component problems. Good.
What does he even NEED to "spin" his way out of?
posted by Al at 1/14/2004 12:31:00 AM
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