Above: This "This Modern World" 'toon from September 2002 illustates what we all knew back then: That the Bush regime was going to invade Iraq no matter what Saddam Hussein did or did not do, no matter what credible evidence it did or did not have to justify an invasion, and with or without the United Nations' rubber stamp. Now, a former member of "President" George W. Bush's Cabinet, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, says Bush and his cronies already had plans to invade Iraq when their hostile occupation of the White House began in early 2001, and he describes what it's like to work for Bush. (In Cabinet meetings, he says, Bush "was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people.") Below: O'Neill, in a March 2001 Reuters photo, looks like he's wondering what the hell he was thinking when he agreed to take the job of Bush's treasury secretary.
It's great to hear it from an insider
We all knew it, but we didn't know it. Now, we do.
Reports The Associated Press today:
CRAWFORD, Texas -- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill contends the United States began laying the groundwork for an invasion of Iraq just days after President Bush took office in January 2001 -- more than two years before the start of the U.S.-led war that ousted Saddam Hussein.
"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill told CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview to be aired Sunday night.
The official American government stance on Iraq, dating to the Clinton administration, was that the United States sought to oust Saddam.
But O'Neill, who was fired by Bush in December 2002, said he had qualms about what he asserted was the pre-emptive nature of the war planning. "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," according to an excerpt of the interview that CBS released [today].
The administration has not found evidence that the Iraqi leader was involved in the Sept. 11 attacks but officials have said they had to consider the possibility that Saddam could have undertaken an even larger scale strike against the United States.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush's term. But, he said, Saddam "was a threat to peace and stability before September 11th, and even more of a threat after September 11."
"It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people," McClellan said in Texas, where the president is staying at his ranch.
O'Neill's interview was part of his effort to promote a new book about the first half of Bush's term, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, for which O'Neill was a primary source....
According to the book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, the Bush administration began examining options for an invasion in the first months after Bush was inaugurated.
O'Neill was in the news yesterday with his report of what it's like to work within the Bush regime. The Associated Press reported:
WASHINGTON -- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, pushed out of the administration for not being a team player, says President Bush was so disengaged during Cabinet meetings that he was like a "blind man in a room full of deaf people."
O'Neill, who has kept silent about the circumstances surrounding his ouster from the Cabinet 13 months ago, is now ready to give his side of the story with a tell-all book that paints Bush as a disengaged president who didn't encourage debate either at Cabinet meetings or in one-on-one meetings with his Cabinet secretaries.
To promote the book which will be out Tuesday, O'Neill was appearing Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes" in an interview with correspondent Lesley Stahl.
In an excerpt of the book released by CBS, O'Neill said that a lack of real dialogue characterized the Cabinet meetings he attended during the first two years of the administration and gave O'Neill the feeling that Bush "was like a blind man in a room full of deaf people."
O'Neill was also quoted in the book as saying that the administration's decision-making process was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on "little more than hunches about what the president might think."
O'Neill said in his CBS interview that the atmosphere was similar during the one-on-one meetings he held with Bush. Speaking of his first meeting with the president, O'Neill said, "I went in with a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage (Bush) on.... I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just listening. It was mostly a monologue."
O'Neill is described as the principal source for the new book, The Price of Loyalty, being published by Simon and Schuster, and written by Ron Suskind, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal. In addition to interviews with O'Neill, Suskind drew on 19,000 documents O'Neill provided, according to CBS, which said Suskind also interviewed dozens of Bush insiders to flesh out his account of the administration's first two years....
Asked about the administration's opinion of the upcoming book, [White House spokesman Scott] McClellan said, "I don't do book reviews."
O'Neill, the former head of aluminum giant Alcoa, ... gained a reputation during his two years in the Bush Cabinet for frequently shooting from the lip with incendiary comments that shook up financial markets and antagonized Wall Street. O'Neill said he was just trying to discuss complicated public policy issues in greater depth than the television sound bites so often used by the typical Washington politicians.
O'Neill was fired in December 2002 when Bush shook up his economic team in search of better salesmen for a new round of tax cuts the president hoped would stimulate a sluggish economy. O'Neill had publicly questioned the need for another round of tax cuts in light of the growing budget deficits. He was replaced by John Snow, former head of CSX Corp., who became a staunch advocate for new tax cuts, which Bush signed into law in May.
Poor White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who seems to be almost as busy with spin and damage control these days as is Howard Dean's spokesman.
McClellan's lame responses to O'Neill's charges, of course, aren't true responses at all. His remark, "It appears that the world according to Mr. O'Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than looking at the reality of the results we are achieving on behalf of the American people," is just an attempt to discredit O'Neill and divert attention from the subject at hand -- that the Bush regime had planned to invade Iraq from Day One -- to the big lie that the Bush regime has been working hard "on behalf of the American people." (During its hostile occupation of the White House, the Bush regime has been working hard only on behalf of the subsidiaries of BushCheneyCorp.)
And that McClellan "would not confirm or deny that the White House began Iraq war planning early in Bush's term" means, of course, that O'Neill's claims are true. If they were not true, McClellan simply would have denied them.
And, of course, while he was at it, spewing forth yet more Bush regime propaganda, Bush regime mouthpiece McClellan falsely linked Saddam Hussein and Iraq to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 when he remarked that Saddam "was a threat to peace and stability before September 11th, and even more of a threat after September 11."
The Bush regime claims that it never made that false link -- while it continues to make that false link.
No doubt the Bush regime will label O'Neill a "disgruntled former employee" -- the stock response that all weaselly organizations use when a whistleblower comes forward. The weaselly organization's technique is to try to divert attention from the whistleblower's incriminating claims to the whistleblower's character, which the organization simultaneously attempts to assassinate.
Bush and his cronies, it has been widely reported, demand Nazi-like loyalty and silence and keep the tighest lid on the White House of any administration in memory (with the exception of things like blowing the cover of the CIA agent who is married to the former ambassador who blew the whistle on the Bush regime's lies about its "evidence" "justifying" its invasion of Iraq, of course). So the members of the Bush regime must be incensed that O'Neill has written a tell-all book. (Reuters notes that O'Neill is "the first major Bush administration insider to launch an attack on the president.")
I'm putting The Price of Loyalty on my amazon.com wish list. I'll bet it's a great read.
Update: The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill (pictured below) is already No. 7 on amazon.com's bestselling book list and it doesn't even come out until Tuesday. Amazon is selling it for $18.20, which is 30 percent off its cover price, with free shipping for orders of more than $25. Click here to order.
And here is another "This Modern World" 'toon from September 2002 about the Bush regime's inevitable invasion of Iraq that I can't help but share: 
6:19:01 PM 
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