We all know that Bush wanted a war so he'd have a better-received presidency, and that he had an agenda of rolling back the New Deal - well, Thom Hartmann has put the two together in a way that it finally clicked for me, even though both thoughts were already sitting side-by-side.
. If you've already twigged to this, nevermind, but it hit me with the force of revelation.
It makes so many things make sense: "I want to be a war president". "I've got political capital and I'm going to spend it". It explains where his apparent missing smarts are. It explains what the war was really for. Anyway, it's a great article, making the parallel with Nixon's power grab. It spells things out; help others who are slow and pass the Eureka moment on. (Don't mind the large amount of quoting, I really don't think Thom or 'Common Dreams' (link again) will mind.)
So why then did George W. Bush lie us into invading and occupying Iraq?
We know that Bush wanted to massively cut taxes on his corporate sponsors and people, like himself, with substantial inherited fortunes. He wanted to weaken government protections of the environment, children, the poor, the elderly, the ozone layer, and our nation's forests. He wanted his oil-rig and mining-interest friends to have more access to public lands.
We know he wanted to undo Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal by stripping the American workplace (particularly government and schools) of unions, rolling back "socialist" unemployment and Social Security programs, and eliminating SEC and tort restraints on predatory corporate behavior. He'd even campaigned on this platform - particularly Social Security privatization - back in 1978 when he unsuccessfully ran for Congress from Texas.
...
We know he wanted to give billions of our tax dollars to churches he approved of, and bring their leaders into the halls of government. He wanted to pass laws incorporating religious dogma about when human life begins, what is appropriate sexuality, and free churches to use tax-exempt dollars to influence politics.
It was an ambitious agenda. In order to bring about this neoconservative paradise, Bush knew he'd need considerable political capital. And that kind of capital didn't come from his being selected as President by the Supreme Court.
Such political capital - such raw political power - would only come, he believed, by his becoming a "war president."
[Nice comments by James Madison on danger of war presidency]
Writer Russ Baker noted in October, 2004, that Mickey Herskowitz, the man Bush had originally hired to write his autobiography ("A Charge To Keep: My Journey To The White House"), told Baker that George Bush was planning his Iraq invasion - to seize and hold political power for himself and the Republican Party - during his first presidential election campaign.
"He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," Herskowitz told Baker. "It was on his mind. He [Bush] 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."
...
It wasn't a war for oil - cheap oil was just a useful secondary benefit.
It wasn't a war against terrorism - that was just a convenient excuse.
It wasn't a war to enrich Bush's and Cheney's cronies - those were just pleasant by-products.
It wasn't a war to show Poppy Bush that Junior was more of a man than him - that was just a personal bonus for Dubya.
It was, pure and simple, well planned years in advance, a war to solidify Bush and the Republican Party's political capital.
It was a war for political power. That had to be first. Everything else - oil, profits, ongoing PATRIOT Act powers, easy manipulation of the media - all could only come if political power was seized and held through at least two decisive election cycles.
The Bush administration lied us into an invasion to get and keep political power. It's that simple.
The same reason Richard Nixon authorized Watergate and then lied about the cover-up. The same reason Nixon lied about his "secret plan" to get out of Vietnam.
When Americans - and the US media - finally realize that Bush's lie was just to get "political capital," to increase the "discretionary power of the President" so he could undo Roosevelt's New Deal and seal power across all three branches of government for his Party, they will turn on him and his Republican co-conspirators.
If it comes out in the open before the election of 2006, Republicans could even lose the House and the Senate, which would virtually guarantee investigations of the many other crimes of the Bush administration. (For example, "bribery" is one of two crimes cited in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment - and the Big Pharma/Medicaid and Big Tobacco/lawsuit settlement cases may qualify.)
