THIS is a pattern?former Bush official spills beans in attempt to save reputation from association with the most toxic, worst failed government in U.S. history. It follows the trail left by former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, fired from his job in late 2003, then author with Ron Suskind of "The Price of Loyalty." As reported four years ago by Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes, "Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration has been too secretive about how decisions have been made."
Indeed, "secretive." As, Digby noted yesterday, Thomas E. Ricks and Karen DeYoung in the Washington Post discuss the latest insider version of the Bush narrative, this the first from a former Pentagon official. Douglas Feith, who was the hard-right neocon undersecretary of defense for policy, tackles head-on the Bush process of "War and Decision" in a forthcoming book of that title.
Ricks and DeYoung write,
Among the disclosures made by Feith in "War and Decision," scheduled for release next month by HarperCollins, is Bush's declaration, at a Dec. 18, 2002, National Security Council meeting, that "war is inevitable." The statement came weeks before U.N. weapons inspectors reported their initial findings on Iraq and months before Bush delivered an ultimatum to Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Feith, who says he took notes at the meeting, registered it as a "momentous comment."Well, that's interesting, as Digby describes, because "Codpiece" (Bush) repeated publicly a number of times thereafter, literally until right up to the invasion, some version of "I hope this Iraq situation will be resolved peacefully."
The version of this I mentioned recently in Maine Owl was the March 6, 2003 press conference, where President Bush issued three separate phrases suggesting a decision to go to war had not yet been made, BUSH: "I hope we don't have to go to war, but if we go to war," and "I've not made up our mind about military action. Hopefully, this can be done peacefully," and "We hope we don't go to war; but if we should, we will present a supplemental [budget]."
I find these public statements of uncertainty about war revealing lies that are exposed if you understand the secret machinations that were occurring underneath. Mark Danner covered this ground unearthed by the Downing Street Memos in a long piece for the New York Review Books in June 2005. The bottom line?
DANNER: What the Downing Street memo confirms for the first time is that President Bush had decided, no later than July 2002, to "remove Saddam, through military action," that war with Iraq was "inevitable"?and that what remained was simply to establish and develop the modalities of justification; that is, to come up with a means of "justifying" the war and "fixing" the "intelligence and facts...around the policy."Feith should not have been so taken with a "momentous comment" about inevitable war in December 2002, unless he was not in Cheney's loop to the extent he is believed to have been.
See also, THIS POST on the secret Downing Street memo underneath the January 31, 2003 Bush-Blair meeting.
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