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Elites Blast BushThree establishment heavyweights struck sharp blows to President Bush's policies and credibility in early January. Former Bush Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, the Army War College and the Carnegie Endowment, acting separately, accused the president of purposely misrepresenting the reasons for the war on Iraq. And they forcefully argued that the war would backfire on the U.S.
The plan to oust Saddam Hussein, according to O'Neill, was underway long before Sept. 11. O'Neill said that from the first day the president took office he tasked the National Security Agency (NSA) with "building the case against Hussein and looking at how we could take him out and change Iraq into a new country." O'Neill, who was a member of the NSA, said the discussions included how to divvy up Iraq's oil. Publicly, the president has stated that the Iraq war was part of the "war on terrorism" that began on Sept. 11. According to O'Neill, the White House instead used the opportunity presented by Sept. 11 to implement its predetermined war on Iraq. O'Neill, long praised by Bush as a "straight shooter," said that the president was also dishonest about his economic policies. He said the president was acutely aware that his tax cuts benefited the rich, but publicly promoted them as helping the middle class. WAR COLLEGE FAULTS BUSH STRATEGYOn January 12, The Washington Post reported that a "scathing" new report issued by the U.S. Army War College "broadly criticizes the Bush administration's handling of the war on terrorism, accusing it of taking a detour into an 'unnecessary' war in Iraq and pursuing an 'unrealistic' quest against terrorism that may lead to U.S. wars with states that pose no serious threat." The War College is the Army's premier academic institution. The report, written by Jeffrey Record, criticizes the White House for "insisting on co-conspiratorial links between the Saddam Hussein regime and al-Qaeda, repeatedly rais[ing] the specter of the dictator's transfer of weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaeda; and encourag[ing] the view that Saddam Hussein had a direct hand in the 9/11 attacks." It says the White House perpetrated this falsehood in order to "unnecessarily expand the war on terror against a state that was not at war with the U.S. and that posed no direct or imminent threat." Consequently, the report concludes, the president's war on terror "is strategically unfocused, promises much more than it can deliver, and threatens to dissipate U.S. military and other resources in an endless and hopeless search for absolute security." The War College report also faults the White House for an "absence of significant international participation" in Iraq and says the chaos will "continue as long as the U.S. is unwilling to share authority over Iraq's future with the U.N." In the same week, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace issued a comprehensive report by four weapons experts showing that the administration purposely overstated and misrepresented pre-war claims about the "imminent threat" of Iraqi biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. Contrary to the president's claims, the Carnegie report concludes that, following the first Gulf War, "Iraq's nuclear program had been dismantled and there was no convincing evidence of its reconstitution…. Operations Desert Storm and Desert Fox, and UN inspections and sanctions effectively destroyed Iraq's large-scale chemical weapon production capabilities." It concludes that the "U.S. strategy should be revised to eliminate the policy of unilateral preventive war." Bob Wing is managing editor of War Times. |
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