Editorial from the leftie Post.
Mr. O'Neill and Iraq
Thursday, January 15, 2004; Page A20
EVEN BEFORE its official publication this week, the account of the Bush White House by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind had been cited by half the Democratic presidential contenders. Mr. Suskind's chief source, ex-Treasury secretary Paul H. O'Neill, apparently told him that the invasion of Iraq was being planned from the first days of the Bush administration. Retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark declared that this claim "just confirms my worst suspicions," adding that Congress should "investigate fully why this country had to fight a war it didn't have to fight." Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.) said of Mr. O'Neill's claim: "It would mean they were dead set on going to war alone since almost the day they took office and deliberately lied to the American people, Congress and the world." A little more cautiously, former Vermont governor Howard Dean noted "new information about the true circumstances about the Bush administration's push for war." Rep. Dennis J. Kucinich (Ohio) lamented that "the American people, in effect, have been misled."
The question is: Who is doing the misleading. During his rocky tenure as Treasury secretary, Mr. O'Neill proved to be a loose cannon, sometimes spooking financial markets with wild remarks, sometimes holding forth with extreme confidence on subjects, such as African development, about which he knew little; he did not exhibit the "100 percent, rock-solid, common-sense judgment" that Mr. Clark ascribed to him on Sunday. Now Mr. O'Neill insists that President Bush was determined from the moment he took office to oust Saddam Hussein, recalling meetings of the National Security Council that took place in January 2001, eight months before the attacks of Sept. 11. "From the very beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," Mr. O'Neill told CBS's "60 Minutes" on Sunday. "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, 'Go find me a way to do this.' "
It's no surprise that Iraq should have come up at Mr. Bush's first national security meetings -- after all, the United States was patrolling the skies above Iraq to enforce "no-fly" zones. Nor is it surprising that the Bush team should have contemplated regime change: That was the declared policy of the United States, supported by the Clinton administration and Congress. Mr. O'Neill's account is new only insofar as he suggests that the administration had moved beyond the contemplation of options to a decision on Iraq. But if this is what Mr. O'Neill believes, his memory conflicts with other versions of history. Three days after one of the national security meetings that Mr. O'Neill remembers, The Post reported that Iraq policy had indeed been discussed but that the administration was divided on the right course. Two weeks after that, the United States unleashed airstrikes on Iraq, continuing a pattern begun by Bill Clinton; again, the press accounts of the time describe a debate in the administration, but no clear conclusion. Even as late as Aug. 5, 2002, as The Post's Bob Woodward has described it, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell had a two-hour meeting with the president in which he laid out the dangers of going to war in Iraq. If the administration's policy was already set in stone, a Cabinet minister who was closer to national security matters than was Mr. O'Neill evidently did not know about it.
The wisdom of waging war in Iraq is a legitimate and important topic of political debate. But the Democratic candidates do no favors to their positions when they accept, uncritically, a half-unsurprising and half-dubious account, for no better reason than that it fits their prejudices. |
