George Bush’s former treasury secretary Paul O’Neill has revealed that the US President took office in January 2001 fully intending to invade Iraq and desperate to find an excuse for pre-emptive war against Saddam Hussein.
O’Neill was fired in December 2002 as a result of disagreements over tax cuts. He is the first prominent Bush administration insider to attack the President. He likened Bush at cabinet meetings to “a blind man in a room full of deaf people”, according to excerpts from a CBS interview to be shown Sunday.
“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill said. “For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.”
O’Neill and other White House insiders have given the journalist Ron Suskind documents for a new book, The Price Of Loyalty, revealing that as early as the first three months of 2001 the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Saddam Hussein.
“There are memos,” Suskind told CBS. “One of them marked ‘secret’ says ‘Plan for Post- Saddam Iraq’.”
Another Pentagon document entitled Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oil Field Contracts talks about contractors from 40 states and which ones have interests in Iraq.
O’Neill is also quoted in the new book saying the President was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.
“It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it,” said O’Neill. “The President saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.’”
White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected O’Neill’s remarks by saying: “We appreciate his service. While we’re not in the business of doing book reviews, 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.” (Albawaba.com)
© 2004 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
