EXCLUSIVE: BUSH WANTED TO INVADE IRAQ IF ELECTED IN 2000
Unbelievably, this story has been skipped over this morning. I believe that it is the follow-up, knock-out punch to the explosives story. Please reccommend this and lets try to get it out to the major media (I first heard it this morning on Air America).
http://www.mydd.com/story/2004/10/28/44532/640
First, of all, it's worth noting this article is based on a set of tape-recorded interviews with Bush family biographer Mickey Herskowitz. Herskowitz's name is on George W. Bush's 1999 campaign biography, as well as the family-authorized 2003 biography of Prescott Bush. This guy has had unprecedented access to the entire Bush family. I'm sure he's about to be smeared into the ground, but on this topic I'd bet he's about as unimpeachable a source as it gets.
First of all, Bush said to Herskowitz in 1999 that if he has a chance to invade Iraq, he'll do it. Two years before September 11th, mind you. Wow. Did September 11th really change ... anything?
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. "It was on his mind. He said to me: `One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.' And he said, `My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, `If I have a chance to invade....if I had that much capital, I'm not going to waste it. I'm going to get everything passed that I want to get passed and I'm going to have a successful presidency."
9/11 gave him the chance, and he jumped at it.
Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."
Herskowitz was of the opinion that the GOP leadership is convinced that war is the key to getting the political capital needed to pass your agenda. Notice who gets credit for this idea.
According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."
Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."
Herskowitz is strongly of the opinion that even though GHWB agreed with the principle of starting a war, he knew that Iraq would be too big to handle and was opposed to the war GWB chose. Why? Because Scowcroft came out against it, and he wouldn't have done so without GHWB's nod.
Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.
"I know [Bush senior] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to it. I asked him if he had talked to W about invading Iraq. "He said, `No I haven't, and I won't, but Brent [Scowcroft] has.' Brent would not have talked to him without the old man's okaying it." Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush's administration, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.
Back on the campaign trail... Bush even mentioned taking out Iraq rather flippantly in 1999, as if it wouldn't be a big deal.
Herskowitz's revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush's pre-election thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe's David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice: "It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam's weapons stash," wrote Nyhan. `I'd take `em out,' [Bush] grinned cavalierly, `take out the weapons of mass destruction...I'm surprised he's still there," said Bush of the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.'s father...It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush's first big clinker."
I guess now, tens of thousands of lives later, hundreds of billions of dollars later, 380 tons of explosives into the hands of terrorists later, we know exactly what it was.