| Members of the Bush administration each agreed on the invasion of Iraq for their own reasons (none of which had to do with US national security or benevolent compassion for the Iraqi people.) |
| Karl Rove and his team wanted to change the discussion. Remember back to the months leading up to the war…winter 2002-2003. The 9/11 story was receding in the psyche of the public. The media was returning it's attention to the economic plight of the 3 million Americans that had lost their jobs, the mortgage foreclosures, business failures, bankruptcies, and the other ramifications of the recession. The inevitable comparisons to the Clinton economy were becoming more frequent. Something had to be introduced into the news cycle to distract the media and the public from the economic mess. And it needed to happen fast. Donald Rumsfeld and his team wanted to consolidate power at the Pentagon. He wanted control of areas generally under the authority of the State Department. Dick Cheney wanted to repay his business cronies for their support of the Republican party and the administration, as well as for his own deferred salary which he continued to draw from defense contractor Halliburton and the millions he will no doubt reap from the defense industry upon his return to the private sector.. George W. Bush sees himself as the greatest evangelizer of all evangelical Christians. He has said that he believes he has been chosen by God to bring "freedom and democracy" to the middle east. This may not be quite the same as a religious crusade to bring Jesus to the heathens, but in a mind uncluttered with details as is Bushes, this amounts to the same thing. He believes that it is his personal mission to bring western values and civilization to the Islamic world. He believes that if he can establish a democracy in Iraq, it will spread throughout the middle east and he will be remembered as the great leader who converted the great Arab hordes to Christianity. The United States military has signed a work order with Halliburton to do nearly $5 billion in new work in Iraq under a giant logistics contract that has so far earned the company $9.1 billion, the Army said Wednesday. The new deal, worth $4.97 billion over the next year, was not made public when it was signed because the Army did not consider that such an announcement was necessary, she said. Source: "Halliburton's Iraq Job" By REUTERS (NY Times) - July 7, 2005 Project for the New American Century, or PNAC, was founded in 1997. Among its supporters were three Republican former officials who were sitting out the Democratic presidency of Bill Clinton: Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz. In open letters to Clinton and GOP congressional leaders the next year, the group called for "the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power" and a shift toward a more assertive U.S. policy in the Middle East, including the use of force if necessary to unseat Saddam. By [Sept. 11, 2001], Cheney was vice president, Rumsfeld was secretary of defense, and Wolfowitz his deputy at the Pentagon. Of the 18 people who signed the letter, 10 are now in the Bush administration. As well as Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, they include Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage; John Bolton, who is undersecretary of state for disarmament; and Zalmay Khalilzad, the White House liaison to the Iraqi opposition. Other signatories include William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard magazine, and Richard Perle, chairman of the advisory Defense Science Board. The next morning — before it was even clear who was behind the attacks — Rumsfeld insisted at a Cabinet meeting that Saddam's Iraq should be "a principal target of the first round of terrorism," according to Bob Woodward's book Bush At War. What started as a theory in 1997 was now on its way to becoming official U.S. foreign policy. "Before 9/11, this group ... could not win over the president to this extravagant image of what foreign policy required," said Ian Lustick, a Middle East expert at the University of Pennsylvania. "After 9/11, it was able to benefit from the gigantic eruption of political capital, combined with the supply of military preponderance in the hands of the president. And this small group, therefore, was able to gain direct contact and even control, now, of the White House." Now that American bombs could soon be falling on Iraq, Kristol admits to feeling "some sense of responsibility" for pushing for a war that will cost human lives. But, he said, he would also feel responsible if "something terrible" happened because of U.S. inaction. Kristol believes the United States will be "vindicated when we discover the weapons of mass destruction and when we liberate the people of Iraq." He predicts that many of the allies who have been reluctant to join the war effort would participate in efforts to rebuild and democratize Iraq. Source: ABC News "Nightline" from abc.go.com -- This report originally aired on Nightline on March 5, 2003. |
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