1 Boring Old Man

I think I know the answer. They’d geared up to fight an Iraq War against a gradient before coming into office – long before. Everything was in place, probably in the works for Bush’s second term [the other Bush], but they were forced to take an eight year hiatus. I now think that the September 11th attack was both their nemesis and their ally. It interrupted their plan, but it made it easier. They were so geared up to fight their way into their planned war, they couldn’t change gears. There was and inertia in their thinking. They just had to adapt their timetable to fit a new set of circumstances. They’d planned to seize the power. When it landed in their laps, they seized it anyway.

Ex-Defense Official Assails Colleagues Over Run-Up to War
By Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 9, 2008

In the first insider account of Pentagon decision-making on Iraq, one of the key architects of the war blasts former secretary of state Colin Powell, the CIA, retired Gen. Tommy R. Franks and former Iraq occupation chief L. Paul Bremer for mishandling the run-up to the invasion and the subsequent occupation of the country. Douglas J. Feith, in a massive score-settling work, portrays an intelligence community and a State Department that repeatedly undermined plans he developed as undersecretary of defense for policy and conspired to undercut President Bush’s policies.

Bush versus the Beltway

Thursday, November 13, 2003  4:00 PM

American Enterprise Institute 

Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

In her new book, Bush versus the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department Tried to Stop the War on Terror, best-selling author Laurie Mylroie analyzes decision-making processes inside the CIA and the State Department, specifically those that allowed key intelligence on terrorist activities before the 9/11 attacks to be overlooked. She also argues that indisputable evidence on Iraq’s development of weapons of mass destruction and information about Iraqi links to al Qaeda were systematically overlooked for the wrong reasons and that the institutional mindset propagated by these agencies–total disbelief in the continued existence of state-sponsored terrorism after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing–allowed states such as Iraq the opportunity to act through international terrorist organizations without fear of retribution. The war in Iraq, Mylroie argues, was not only justifiable, but necessary. Please join the author, Laurie Mylroie, as well as panelists Fritz Ermarth, Richard Perle, and Danielle Pletka, to discuss the books ideas about intelligence gathering, national security, and the war on terrorism.

But then, if you have the stomach for it, there’s always Rebuilding America’s Defenses from the Project for the New American Century published in 2000. Even though they’d been out of office for eight years, they were still working on the plans of George H.W. Bush’s Defense Department. The document aggrandizes the wisdom of, guess who, former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and his assistant, Paul Wolfowitz, and their Defence Guidance Document [1991] laying out what would become the "Bush Doctrine." The whole thrust of the P.N.A.C. and A.E.I. was that the Diplomats of the State Department and the Spooks from the C.I.A. were on the wrong track – focusing on Terrorists and ignoring Iraq and Iran.