"No President Wants War"---Really? Let's Go Down Memory Lane, Shall We?

[journalist3072]

So during today's press conference, it was clear that the Chimp was talking out of his rear end, and thinking with it as well!

He was asked by veteran journalist Helen Thomas what was the real reason he went to war, and he falsely asserted that he didn't even want to go to war!

QUESTION: I'd like to ask you, Mr. President -- your decision to invade Iraq has caused the deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, wounds of Americans and Iraqis for a lifetime.

Every reason given, publicly at least, has turned out not to be true. My question is: Why did you really want to go to war? From the moment you stepped into the White House, your Cabinet officers, former Cabinet officers, intelligence people and so forth -- but what's your real reason? You have said it wasn't oil, the quest for oil. It hasn't been Israel or anything else. What was it?

BUSH: I think your premise, in all due respect to your question and to you as a lifelong journalist -- that I didn't want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong, Helen, in all due respect.

QUESTION: And...

BUSH: Hold on for a second, please. Excuse me. Excuse me.

No president wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it's just simply not true.

Well, since George W. Bush seems intent on lying and not correcting the record, allow me to do so on his behalf.

Contrary to his assertions today, George W. Bush DID want to go to war. In fact, he was determined to, from the first day he walked into the White House.

- Two years before September 11, then-candidate George W. Bush told his ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz that he planned to invade Iraq if elected President. He told Herskovitz that invading Iraq was on his mind because in Bush's words: "One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. 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."

- Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has also said Bush planned to invade Iraq, just days after entering the White House. O'Neill said: "From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go. For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap."

Furthermore, O'Neill says: "It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying 'Go find me a way to do this.'"

- Likewise, former White House Counter-terrorism Chief Richard Clarke says that in the aftermath of 9/11, he expected the focus to be on al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Instead, Bush's focus was on Iraq. Clarke says: "They were talking about Iraq on 9/11. They were talking about it on 9/12."

- A Downing Street Memo revealed that when Bush met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair on January 31, 2003, he made it clear he intended to invade Iraq even if there was no evidence of WMDs, and even in the absence of a second UN resolution.

In fact, Bush was so concerned about the lack of evidence against Sadaam Hussein, that he even considered flying our own U2 reconnaissance planes over Iraq, and disguising them as U.N. planes by painting them in U.N. colors. In other words, in the absence of evidence, he wanted to entrap Sadaam.

The evidence is clear that Bush was intent on going to war with Iraq, even before he stepped a foot in the White House as President.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines04/1028-01.htm

http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/01/10/oneill.bush/

http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/?q=node/7408