So, this is pretty much what many of us suspected all along, but Gareth Porter at the Asian Times does a wonderful job of pulling it all together. The real bombshell here is that they deliberately chose to ignore Bin-Laden in favor of establishing new regimes:
Feith's book, War and Decision, released last month, provides excerpts of the paper Rumsfeld sent to President George W Bush on September 30, 2001, calling for the administration to focus not on taking down Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network but on the aim of establishing "new regimes" in a series of states by "aiding local peoples to rid themselves of terrorists and to free themselves of regimes that support terrorism".
In quoting from that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase "some other states" in brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related Pentagon "campaign plan" document, the Taliban and Saddam regimes are listed as "state regimes" against which "plans and operations" might be mounted, but the names of four other states are blacked out "for security reasons".
General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia....
In quoting from that document, Feith deletes the names of all of the states to be targeted except Afghanistan, inserting the phrase "some other states" in brackets. In a facsimile of a page from a related Pentagon "campaign plan" document, the Taliban and Saddam regimes are listed as "state regimes" against which "plans and operations" might be mounted, but the names of four other states are blacked out "for security reasons".
General Wesley Clark, who commanded the North Atlantic Treaty Organization bombing campaign in the Kosovo war, recalls in his 2003 book Winning Modern Wars being told by a friend in the Pentagon in November 2001 that the list of states that Rumsfeld and deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz wanted to take down included Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Sudan and Somalia....
Can we get a confirmation on that, for ye of little Feith?
When this writer asked Feith after a recent public appearance which countries' names were deleted from the documents, he cited security reasons for the deletion. But when he was asked which of the six regimes on the Clark list were included in the Rumsfeld paper, he replied, "All of them."
and the kicker - Bush apparently was the one holding back from attacking Iran:
Bush had not approved the explicit aim of regime change in Iran, Syria and four other countries proposed by Rumsfeld. Thus Rumsfeld adopted the aggressive military plan targeting multiple regimes in the Middle East for regime change even though it was not White House policy.
Apparently there ARE some things too stupid for Bush...
Please give the rest of the article a read. While I know that many of us are absorbed by the spectacle of the primaries, and information like this simply confirms pre-existing suspicions, and that none of us would trust Feith further than we could throw him... this information combined with the increasing aggressive diplomatic stance towards Iran point to an attempt to get us embroiled in yet ANOTHER war before then end of Bush's term.
Hat tip to George Washington's Blog where I initially found the lead for this story, and of course to Gareth Porter's excellent piece. While I don't really have much to add to this (kinda both reeling in shock and sick sense of "dammit, I told you so"), my point in posting here is to get as much attention to this story as possible - while not quite the Reichstag Fire event many of us have suspected 9/11 of being, this certainly proves the Bush Administration's willingness to use those types of tactics.
I'll leave you with this:
A senior officer on the Joint Staff told State Department counter-terrorism director Sheehan he had heard terrorist strikes characterized more than once by colleagues as a "small price to pay for being a superpower".