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POLITICS: More Allegations That Bush Lied About Reasons for War

Emad Mekay

WASHINGTON, Jan 12 2004 (IPS) - A flurry of recent reports and statements supports accusations that the Bush administration misrepresented evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to go to war in Iraq.

The latest claims come from a former cabinet minister, who says President George W. Bush was planning to invade Iraq from his first day in office in 2001.

According to former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill, Bush was also dishonest about his reasons for invading Iraq.

In numerous interviews over the weekend, O’Neill said the plan to unseat Saddam Hussein was well underway long before the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States.

Bush has openly maintained that the war was motivated by fear that Saddam might use WMD against the United States, or put them in the hands of terrorist groups that targeted the country on 9/11.

No such weapons have been found in Iraq despite hundreds of experts having scoured its territory since the U.S. military led an invasion last March.

In a press conference before the invasion, Bush said, “September the 11th changed the strategic thinking, at least as far as I was concerned, for how to protect our country”.

“It used to be that we could think that you could contain a person like Saddam Hussein, that oceans would protect us from his type of terror. September the 11th should say to the American people that we’re now a battlefield, that weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a terrorist organisation could be deployed here at home.”

O’Neill, who collaborated on a soon-to-be-released book about his two years in Bush’s inner circle – he was fired for disagreeing with the president’s economic policies – contradicts the view that 9/11 changed the administration’s approach.

>From the onset, “we were building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country, and, if we did that, it would solve everything,” O’Neill said.

“It was about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, ‘Fine. Go find me a way to do this’.”

O’Neill’s statements come in the midst of a number of reports that have also undermined the administration’s credibility on attacking Iraq.

On Monday, the U.S. Army War College issued a paper that accused Bush of mishandling the “war on terrorism” by distracting it with the “unnecessary” conflict in Iraq.

It also called the terror fight an ”unrealistic” quest that could lead to U.S. wars with “states and non-state entities that pose no serious threat”.

The report, by Professor Jeffrey Record of the Air War College in Alabama State, warns that the administration’s policy has brought the army “near the breaking point”.

“The result (of the war on Iraq) has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East,” wrote Record.

That war has also diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault “by an undeterrable al-Qaeda”, he added.

Monday also saw the launch of ‘The Bubble of American Supremacy’, a new book by billionaire financier George Soros that contains a scathing attack on U.S. foreign policy.

Soros compares Bush’s security doctrine to financial “bubbles” caused by poor analysis.

The 74-year-old financier vowed to spend more of his money to try to get Bush voted out in the 2004 presidential elections. To date he has pledged several million dollars to groups intent on unseating the incumbent.

“I have made rejection of the Bush doctrine the central project of my life for the next year,” he told an audience at Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP).

Last week a CEIP report concluded the administration “systematically” inflated the threat from Iraq’s weapons programmes prior to the war.

Some experts say the latest allegations that Bush exaggerated the Iraq threat merit an investigation and perhaps even impeachment.

If O’Neill can back his claims with evidence, they could lead to impeachment of not only the president but also some of his ministers, according to Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois and author of ‘Destroying World Order’.

“He (O’Neill) provides direct personal evidence that they were planning this war right from the very beginning and told whatever lies they felt necessary to convince the American people, the American media and worst of all, Congress,” Boyle said.

“This clearly is a high crime and a misdemeanour warranting an impeachment and the removal from office of the president, the vice president and the secretary of defence, for sure.”

O’Neill said he has documentary evidence to prove his statement, including transcripts of National Security Council meetings.

Others say that the allegations might prove effective in convincing the U.S. public, which to date has appeared to support the war, to not re-elect Bush.

“It was enormously frustrating – frustrating is not an adequate word. It was alarming in the run-up to the war to watch those lies being spewed by the administration as full justification to go to war,” said Jacqueline Cabasso, executive director of the Western States Legal Foundation, a California-based group that lobbies against nuclear weapons.

The recent reports have changed the situation, she added in an interview.

“I think, this has to be viewed as a kind of incremental contribution to a picture that is slowly being developed, like a Polaroid picture, except now it’s a little bit clearer, and when somebody else says something else, it’s going to a little bit clearer.”