The Rush to War (updated)

[ck4829]

1997 - PNAC wants Clinton to invade Iraq
An obscure, ominous-sounding right-wing policy group called Project for the New American Century, or PNAC - affiliated with Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rumsfeld's top deputy Paul Wolfowitz and Bush's brother Jeb - even urged then-President Clinton to invade Iraq back in January 1998.

Unknown Month, 1999 - Bush tells an Author that he wants to invade Iraq
"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.commondreams.org/headlines04/1028-01.htm

October, 1999 - Bush meets with the secretive Council for National Policy
Bush and the CNP meet for the first time. It is not known what they discussed.

September, 2000 - Rebuilding America's Defenses (PNAC)
"The process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor..."

January, 2001 - Bush's Real Plans
The Bush Administration began making plans for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001.
http://www.derechos.org/nizkor/iraq/doc/bush3.html

Days before 9/11 - Jeb Bush writes an order declaring Martial Law if a catastrophic event were to happen
September 11, 2001 - 9/11 Attacks
Hours after 9/11 - Jeb Bush seals up records at Dekker's Flight School. Why did Jeb do this?
Strange Things:
1. We were not 100% certain of the identity of the Hijackers at that time. So, how did Jeb know where to go?
2. Two of the 9/11 Hijackers trained there
3. Jeb and Katherine Harris promoted this school

March 8, 2002 - Iraq Options Paper, Iraq: Legal Background, Memo from David Manning, Memo from Christopher Meyer, Memo from Peter Ricketts, and a Memo from Jack Straw to Blair all show that:
*The UK government anticipated "nation building over many years," in contradiction to public case by Bush administration. British also believed Iraq might acquire WMD without Saddam Hussein in power.
*Bush administration's interpretation of international law, which eventually invoked for the invasion, was so bizarre it was not shared by any other nation on earth (including UK).
*Aim was always regime change. Bush had no plan for future of Iraq.
* The UN process was a sham for Blair's sake; aim was not disarmament but regime change, which had already been decided on.
*Aim was regime change, but that wouldn't sell; WMD issue was useful for PR reasons.
*Even UK government at the highest levels believed the Bush administration claims of an Iraq-Al Qaida links were false.
*UK government at its highest levels did not believe the US had any plan to be certain a new Iraqi government would be an improvement on Saddam and would not develop WMD.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x3846427

May, 2002 - The Bush Administration meets with the secretive Council for National Policy to deal with Saddam. The person who wrote about the Bush-CNP meeting, Dr. Alexandr Nemets, reported that among the 500 "prominent" attendees, "several high-ranking officials in the Bush administration made speeches and participated in panel discussions." He reported a complete uniformity of judgment – at a meeting attended by Bush administration officials when the Bush administration would still pretend for several months to try diplomacy – that Saddam needed to be deposed with military force.

May, 2002 - Air Raids Increase
THE RAF and US aircraft doubled the rate at which they were dropping bombs on Iraq in 2002 in an attempt to provoke Saddam Hussein into giving the allies an excuse for war.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1632566,00.html

July 23, 2002 - The Downing Street Memo
The Memo details how intelligence was "fixed" to sell the case for war to the American public and how the Bush administration’s public assurances of "war as a last resort" were at odds with their privately stated intentions.
http://www.downingstreetmemo.com/

January, 2003 - Bush's SOTU Address
On January 29 President George W. Bush gives his State of the Union speech. Toward the end of the speech he says, "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." (Plame)
http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/01/28/sotu.transcript/

March 20, 2003 - Invasion of Iraq begins

(Last updated June 13, 2005)

[AFSCME girl]

1. Recommended...n/t

[WePurrsevere]

2. Argh!

::Sigh:: How much you want to bet this "memo" will trump the "minutes" and other info for coverage.

This was just in the NY Times: Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made

June 13, 2005
Prewar British Memo Says War Decision Wasn't Made
By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON, June 12 - A memorandum written by Prime Minister Tony Blair's cabinet office in late July 2002 explicitly states that the Bush administration had made "no political decisions" to invade Iraq, but that American military planning for the possibility was advanced. The memo also said American planning, in the eyes of Mr. Blair's aides, was "virtually silent" on the problems of a postwar occupation.

"A postwar occupation of Iraq could lead to a protracted and costly nation-building exercise," warned the memorandum, prepared July 21 for a meeting with Mr. Blair a few days later. It also appeared to take as a given the presence of illicit weapons in Iraq - an assumption that later proved almost entirely wrong - and warned that merely removing Saddam Hussein from power would not guarantee that those weapons could be secured.

A transcript of the memorandum was posted Sunday on the Web site of The Sunday Times of London, after The Washington Post, citing one of the British paper's own correspondents as a source, published excerpts. No image of the original was included, The Times said, to protect its source; a note on the Web site said the last page was missing.

Officials at the British Foreign Office in London, while insisting on anonymity, said in response to queries from The New York Times that they would not dispute the authenticity of the document. A spokesman for the White House, David Almacy, said that while he could not comment on its authenticity, it "was written eight months before the war began. There was significant postwar planning in the time that elapsed."

A British official in Washington said the British government never commented on internal documents made public in the press. But he said that "of course there was concern" in the government before the war about the need for "a full and consistent postconflict plan."

The publication of the memorandum is significant because a previously leaked document, now known as the Downing Street Memo, appeared to suggest that a decision to go to war may have been made that summer. In Washington last week, Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair denied that they made any decision in 2002, and suggested that the memorandum was being misinterpreted.

"No, the facts were not being fixed in any shape or form at all," Mr. Blair said, adding that "no one knows more intimately the discussions that we were conducting as two countries at the time than me."

The White House has insisted that Mr. Bush did not make the decision to invade Iraq until after Secretary of State Colin L. Powell presented the administration's case about Iraqi weapons to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003. That presentation has been discredited in postwar investigations. The White House has also argued that by the time of the invasion it had a sophisticated plan for administering Iraq, even though that plan, as Mr. Bush himself has acknowledged, failed to anticipate a postwar insurgency.

While the latest memorandum appears to have been written by a British intelligence official after a visit to Washington, the central fact reported - that the American military was in the midst of advanced planning for an invasion of Iraq - was no secret. The New York Times published details of that plan two weeks before the memorandum was written.

Still, it is revealing about what was known - and assumed - at that time. After noting the risks of a lengthy postwar occupation, the memorandum says that "U.S. military plans are virtually silent on this point. Washington could look to us to share a disproportionate share of the burden. Further work is required to define more precisely the means by which the desired endstate would be created, in particular what form of government might replace Saddam Hussein's regime and the timescale within which it would be possible to identify a successor."

On unconventional weapons, the memorandum also discloses doubts - but not that they existed.

"U.S. military planning unambiguously takes as its objective the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime, followed by elimination of Iraqi W.M.D. It is however, by no means certain, in the view of U.K. officials, that one would necessarily follow from the other. Even if regime change is a necessary condition for controlling Iraqi W.M.D., it is certainly not a sufficient one."

Steven R. Weisman contributed reporting from Washington for this article, and Don Van Natta Jr. and Alan Cowell from London.

All I can think of is.. like heck Bush hadn't already made up his mind .. imo his mind was made up to go into Iraq long before he was even elected.

[AFSCME girl]

3. Welcome to DU, WePurrsevere!

Yes, I'm sure the neocons had plenty of time to "plan strategy" while they cooled their heels during President Clinton's term in office. It will be very interesting to see where all of this Downing Street Memo information leads............


:hi:

[wallen]

4. new memo

Check to see if the ink is dry...

[AFSCME girl]

5. Enjoy your stay here...............

while it lasts.........

[ck4829]

6. self-kick

[AFSCME girl]

7. Hi ck4829

here's an AFSCME girl kick :hi:

[ck4829]

8. Thanks