Who Can Really Say?

Set your VCR's, boys and girls. Sunday night 60 Minutes will air the final hatchet job installment in their popular series "Bush for Dummies".

Part One, first seen 4 months ago, involved the "shocking" revelations in Paul O'Neill's book, The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill, that Iraq war planning began almost immediately after Bush's inauguration, months before 9/11. To O'Neill's credit he at least qualified the claim in the first week after the book's publication:

People are trying to say that I said the president was planning war in Iraq early in the administration. Actually there was a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be a regime change in Iraq.

In Part Two Richard Clarke gets no such credit. From Clarke we learned that Bush didn't take the terrorism threat seriously enough and certainly not as seriously as Bill Clinton's White House did. Hey, fair enough I suppose -- I mean, it's hard taking terrorism seriously while you're planning to invade Iraq, right? But Clarke's revelations didn't budge Bush's poll numbers and I'm guessing it's because if nothing else, people were too busy laughing at the notion that Clinton's "more serious" approach to the problem actually achieved anything.

Now comes Part Three in the form of Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack". Here we learn:

Beginning in late December 2001, President Bush met repeatedly with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks and his war cabinet to plan the U.S. attack on Iraq even as he and administration spokesmen insisted they were pursuing a diplomatic solution, according to a new book on the origins of the war.

The intensive war planning throughout 2002 created its own momentum, according to "Plan of Attack" by Bob Woodward, fueled in part by the CIA's conclusion that Saddam Hussein could not be removed from power except through a war and CIA Director George J. Tenet's assurance to the president that it was a "slam dunk" case that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.

Hold the phone! I thought the war planning started when Bush took office, not after the Taliban was routed 10 months later. And get this from George Tenet -- the WMD's were a slam dunk!

I don't know how much longer Bush can get away with these awful lies. And I think the best way to expose them is to go back to the transcripts of the Congressional debate about the Iraq war resolution, and of the UN Security Council deliberations over Iraq in the winter of '02-'03. I'm sure we'll find all sorts of great stuff there, about how peaceful and well intentioned Saddam was, and how everyone could feel safe in the knowledge that he'd completely disarmed after Gulf War I. Certainly there'll be many quotes from upstanding political leaders and diplomats patiently explaining how Saddam's Iraq was ready to rejoin the peaceful nations of Earth, how the Clinton policy of regime change in Iraq, endorsed unanimously by Congress in 1998, was now outdated and unnecessary. And how about the useful insights from the likes of our French and German friends, that Saddam had disarmed, how sanctions were no longer required, and why Hans Blix could stop his inspections because we all now knew there were no WMD in Iraq.

Yeah, let's go find those quotes -- that'll be the last nail in the coffin of Bush's arrogant, unilateral, and monomaniacal pursuit of War with Iraq.