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Politics : Stockman Scott's Political Debate Porch -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kip518 who wrote (43205)	4/20/2004 8:59:05 AM
From: stockman_scott	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 89467

Bush's war games ___________________ Lead Editorial The San Francisco Chronicle Tuesday, April 20, 2004 URL: sfgate.com WE ALREADY knew that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney came to office preoccupied with Iraq. Both former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill and former counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke have accused this administration of fixating on Iraq at the expense of eliminating terrorist threats posed by al Qaeda. Now, journalist Bob Woodward, who helped expose the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon's resignation, has provided extensively detailed revelations about the Bush administration's secret plans for regime change in Iraq. In his new book, "Plan of Attack," which he discussed Sunday night on CBS's "60 Minutes," Woodward reveals that five days after Sept. 11, 2001, Bush told National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that although he had "to do Afghanistan" first, he was determined to do something about Saddam Hussein later. By November 2001, the president personally ordered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to draw up secret plans to invade Iraq and told Gen. Tommy Franks to publicly deny making war plans. Woodward also confirms that Bush, Cheney and CIA Director George Tenet discussed how to present intelligence about WMDs in a way that would persuade Congress and the American people to support the war in Iraq. One of Woodward's startling new revelations involves a meeting that took place between Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, the Saudi Arabian ambassador to the United States, and the president. After Bush assured Bandar that he did, in fact, intend to invade Iraq, the Saudi ambassador told the president that the Saudis hoped to "fine-tune oil prices," (i.e., lower them) before the 2004 presidential election, which would help improve American economic conditions. The meeting between Bandar and Bush raises troubling questions about the close economic ties between the House of Saud and the Bush family -- connections that have been subjected to critical scrutiny in two recent books, Kevin Phillip's "American Dynasty" and Craig Unger's "House of Bush, House of Saud." The Saudis, for example, led the recent OPEC effort to cut oil production, which resulted in higher gas prices at home. This raises the unsettling question: Did the Saudis hope to raise the price so that it could be lowered in the months before the election? Another disturbing disclosure in Woodward's book is that Bush secretly approved diverting $700 million, allocated by Congress for operations in Afghanistan, to build pipelines and runways in Kuwait in preparation for an invasion of Iraq. But the president failed to seek congressional approval for this diversion -- an act that may violate a section of the U.S. Constitution that bars the executive branch from unilaterally shifting funds away from any project explicitly appropriated by Congress. Pentagon officials on Monday took issue with the size and intent of the funding transfer described by Woodward. However, congressional Democrats should not take this administration's word for it. They need to fully investigate whether the Bush White House may have illegally shifted money allocated for a war in Afghanistan to preparations for a war in Iraq. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle