[Mb-civic] Bush Wanted War - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Bush Wanted War
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By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Thursday, March 30, 2006; 12:00 AM

It is my firm belief that if, say, a few dozen people simultaneously did 
an Internet search for the words "Bush lied," computers all over the 
country would crash and the energy grid would buckle, producing a 
rolling blackout that would begin somewhere around Terre Haute, Ind., 
and end in Barnstable, Mass. So common is the statement "Bush lied" that 
it seems sometimes that I am the only blue-state person who does not 
think it is true. Then, last week, the indomitable Helen Thomas changed 
all that with a single question. She asked George Bush why he wanted "to 
go to war" from the moment he "stepped into the White House," and the 
president said, "You know, I didn't want war." With that, the last 
blue-state skeptic folded.

I would not go so far as to say that Bush wanted war from Day One in the 
White House, but there was plenty of evidence he had Saddam on his mind 
and in his sights from the very moment he got the news of the terrorist 
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. We have it from 
Richard Clarke, formerly the White House's chief anti-terrorism 
official, that within a day of the attacks Bush was inquiring if Saddam 
might have had a hand in them. When told no -- "But, Mr. President, 
al-Qaeda did this," Clarke told him -- it became instantly clear that 
this was not the answer Bush wanted. "'Look into Iraq, Saddam,' the 
president said testily," Clarke writes in his book, "Against All Enemies."

Similarly, Bob Woodward says in his book, "Plan of Attack," that not 
only was Bush fixated on Iraq, but by Thanksgiving of 2001, he already 
had told Don Rumsfeld to prepare a plan for the invasion of that 
country. "Let's get started on this," the president said, cautioning the 
defense secretary not to tell anyone. Rumsfeld said that eventually he 
would have to take CIA Director George Tenet into his confidence. 
"'Fine."' Woodward quotes Bush as saying -- "but not now."

As for myself, I was told by a European intelligence official that after 
flying to Washington right after the 9/11 attacks, he was stunned to 
discover that talk had already turned to Iraq. This was particularly 
true at the Pentagon, where Paul Wolfowitz was obsessed with Iraq, and 
that seems to have been true of the White House as well. And now we know 
from various British accounts that close aides to Prime Minister Tony 
Blair recognized early on that Bush was going to go to war -- and that 
Blair, his poodle at obedient heel, would follow along. More recently we 
learned -- again from British sources -- that even though Bush went back 
to the United Nations for yet another resolution condemning Iraq, he was 
determined to make war almost no matter what.

None of this necessarily means that Bush doctored U.S. intelligence to 
make a purposely false case that Iraq was seething with weapons of mass 
destruction. There is plenty of evidence that others in the 
administration -- Dick Cheney, in particular -- exaggerated such that 
their pants must have caught fire, but nothing so far proved that Bush 
knew he was making a false case. Indeed, foreign intelligence sources 
were in agreement with Bush on Iraq's WMD and so were Clinton 
administration officials who had seen some of the same intelligence. 
Even within the Bush administration, critics of the war -- and there 
were some -- were just as convinced that Saddam had WMD. Colin Powell, 
you may recall, soiled his stellar reputation with a United Nations 
speech that is now just plain sad to read. Almost none of it is true.

There remains, though, the little matter of what was in Bush's gut -- 
not his head, mind you, but that elusive place where emotion resides. It 
was there, in the moments after 9/11, that Bush truly decided on war, 
maybe because Saddam had once tried to kill George H.W. Bush, maybe 
because the neocons had convinced him that a brief war in Iraq would 
have long-term salutary consequences for the entire Middle East, maybe 
because he could not abide the thought that a monster like Saddam might 
die in his sleep -- and maybe because he heard destiny calling.

Whatever Bush's specific reason or reasons, the one thing that's so far 
missing from the record is proof of him looking for a genuine way out of 
war instead of looking for a way to get it started. Bush wanted war. He 
just didn't want the war he got.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/29/AR2006032902057.html?nav=hcmodule
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