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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Iraq: War Planned In 1990s West Virginia’s Sen. Jay Rockefeller stirred a hornet nest this week by saying White House insiders twisted evidence four years ago to dupe America into backing President Bush’s plan to invade Iraq. “They deliberately led the American people to war because they wanted to do that,” Rockefeller told CBS News. He called it “absolute cynical manipulation, deliberately cynical manipulation, to shape American public opinion.” Afterward, West Virginia’s Sen. Robert C. Byrd followed with a blazing U.S. Senate floor speech saying the Bush administration, “by design and deception,” shifted the war on terror away from al-Qaida to Iraq. “The war in Iraq has backfired, producing more recruits for terrorism,” Byrd said. “...The unwise and unprovoked attack on Iraq has been a disastrous one. Mr. Bush’s war has damaged the country because he drove our blessed land into an unnecessary conflict, utterly misreading the consequences.” Rockefeller certainly was correct saying that Bush Republicans “wanted to do that” — to attack Iraq — long before the 9/11 terrorist tragedy gave them an excuse to do so. Some of their war planning was done in secret, but was exposed. Other calls for war were made openly. For the record, here’s a chronology of what caused the Iraq war: In the early 1990s, in the final days of Bush’s father’s administration, Pentagon undersecretary Paul Wolfowitz wrote a secret Defense Policy Guidance plan suggesting another Iraq war to gain “access to vital raw material, primarily Persian Gulf oil,” and to reduce Iraq’s menace to Israel. The New York Times revealed the plan, and it was withdrawn. In 1996, while out of power in Washington, three Republican “neoconservatives” — Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David Wurmser — became advisers to Israel, urging pre-emptive war against Muslim neighbors and removal of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. (All three later were given high posts in the second Bush administration.) In 1998, a group of 18 conservatives — including Wolfowitz, Perle, Donald Rumsfeld and convicted Iran-Contra conspirator Eliott Abrams — wrote to President Clinton, urging him to topple Saddam in Iraq. In 2000, while Clinton still was president, many of the same neoconservatives, as leaders of the Project for the New American Century, drafted a plan to use America’s colossal military might to impose U.S. interests around the world, especially in the oil-rich Iraq region. In addition to Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Perle, PNAC members included Dick Cheney, Jeb Bush and other Republicans allied to the Bush family. Also in 2000, Bush aide Condoleezza Rice wrote a Foreign Affairs article calling for removal of the Saddam government in Iraq — and she told the Council on Foreign Relations that “regime change” in Iraq was needed. After George W. Bush narrowly won the presidency in 2000, he began planning an Iraq invasion even before taking office. The New York Times reported on Jan. 11, 2001, that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and other insiders went to the Pentagon for a top-secret meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, mostly about Iraq. After Bush entered the White House, secret efforts toward an Iraq attack began “from day one,” according to insider books by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill and former counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke. Famously, Time reported that President Bush once told some U.S. senators visiting Rice at the White House, long before the Iraq invasion: “F—- Saddam, we’re taking him out.” From all this, it’s clear that Bush insiders privately plotted the Iraq war for at least a decade. But they couldn’t induce Americans to back an unprovoked invasion of a little country that hadn’t attacked America — until a fluke of history made it possible. The Muslim suicide terrorist strike of Sept. 11, 2001, roused U.S. patriotism. Although none of the 9/11 fanatics were from Iraq, the White House implied that invading Iraq would avenge the national tragedy. Many Democrats in Congress couldn’t oppose the war cry, lest they seem unpatriotic. Thus 9/11 enabled Bush to launch his Iraq war that had been planned in secret for years. Rockefeller was correct to call this a “cynical manipulation” of America. Byrd was correct to say the White House, “by design and deception,” shifted America’s focus off terrorism and onto Iraq.
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