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http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/20036-iraq-the-bush-gangs-excellent-adventure
"I don't know why people are acting shocked - SHOCKED! - by one particular revelation from Peter Baker's new book about the Avignon Presidency.
A book written by New York Times reporter Peter Baker reveals the take of a senior official from former President George W. Bush's administration, who is quoted as saying that America went into Iraq to 'find somebody's ass to kick'. Baker's book titled, 'Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House', reveals some astonishing details about the Iraq War. The anonymous official claims that the only reason US went into Iraq was to look for a fight adding that Afghanistan was too easy...
This is no surprise. Paul O'Neill told us years ago that Iraq was on the schedule from about thirty seconds after the Supreme Court handed the presidency to C-Plus Augustus. Donald Rumsfeld, that old bag of sins, said pretty much the same thing on the afternoon of September 11, 2001. And he said it again at the same time that they were launching their excellent adventure. And wasn't this essentially the same guiding principle that lay behind the remark that should have decent people spitting on Thomas Friedman to this day?
We spent nearly a decade as a nation, and we lost 5000 of our fellow citizens, and, as a nation, we killed somewhere north of 100,000 Iraqis, because we were led through a period of national trauma by a claque of plutocratic sociopaths with the collective emotional maturity of a junior-high nose tackle. One day, historians are going to drink heavily."
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Here's the interview with Thomas Friedman alluded to in the article and linked (5/9/2003)...and I certainly want to spit on him:
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And this, from 2009:
Iraq: Because Rumsfeld Needed Better Targets
"Reviewing a new book about Donald Rumsfeld in Sunday’s Washington Post, CNAS honcho Nathaniel Fick gets at one of the often overlooked but mustn’t-be-forgotten aspects of why the Iraq war happened.
Fick writes that “the two biggest questions about his tenure at the Pentagon — why the United States invaded Iraq, and why it so bungled the aftermath of the Hussein regime’s fall — are often answered with only the simplest of explanations: ideology and hubris.”
In this meticulously researched and compelling book, veteran Washington Post reporter Bradley Graham acknowledges these contributors to the national-security travails of the Bush years, but he highlights another as well: the secretary of defense’s unwavering commitment to military transformation, his vision of a leaner, more lethal Department of Defense. The early phases of the war in Afghanistan apparently vindicated this concept, while the prospect of war in Iraq promised a wider proving ground for it — but the nasty counterinsurgency campaign that followed threatened to undermine it.
Among the various elements of “transformation,” Rumsfeld envisioned a lighter, faster, and more deadly combat force with high-tech support providing a comprehensive view of the battle space. And after 9/11, he really wanted an opportunity to reestablish U.S. credibility by unleashing such a force — he was after a “teaching moment” for anyone who doubted American power.
As Richard Clarke told CBS in 2004, invading Iraq was immediately discussed after 9/11:
As Clarke writes in his book, he expected the administration to focus its military response on Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. He says he was surprised that the talk quickly turned to Iraq.
“Rumsfeld was saying that we needed to bomb Iraq,” Clarke said to Stahl. “And we all said … no, no. Al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan. We need to bomb Afghanistan. And Rumsfeld said there aren’t any good targets in Afghanistan. And there are lots of good targets in Iraq. I said, ‘Well, there are lots of good targets in lots of places, but Iraq had nothing to do with it.
“Initially, I thought when he said, ‘There aren’t enough targets in– in Afghanistan,’ I thought he was joking.
Rumsfeld’s belief in a technologically transformed military, and his desire for an appropriate stage upon which to demonstrate that military’s deadly effectiveness, dovetailed with the neoconservatives’ fantasy of quickly and simply knocking off Saddam Hussein’s regime and installing a friendly government in its place. And the result was that we’ve spent six years (and counting) and about a trillion dollars (and counting) demonstrating the limits of American military power."
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And I just have an unhealthy fixation on Bush. Right.
