Tucson, AZ Daily Star: Memos chip away at administration war motives

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http://www.dailystar.com/dailystar/opinion/81024.php

Memos chip away at administration war motives

The star's view: America went to war against Iraq for the wrong reasons and now plans to pull troops out before it can win the peace against the insurgents.

The Downing Street memos we read about last week confirm what many Americans suspected - that invading Iraq was a foregone conclusion and that Saddam Hussein was an easy target for a nation eager to act after 9/11. British concerns revealed in the leaked memos are the same as those expressed by many Americans later: Why target Saddam when it was Osama bin Laden we should go after?

Today we know the United States planned the war carefully and undertook the invasion with perfection. But in an attack of apparent naivete, the administration believed all it had to do to liberate Iraq was to topple Saddam. It did not plan on bogging down in a massive rebuilding effort. And it did not foresee that eliminating the government - however tyrannical - would invite terrorists into Iraq to fight against Americans and our allies and to kill Iraqis on a massive scale.

According to the memos, six months after 9/11 and a year before the invasion, then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice wanted to speak to the British only about "regime change" in Iraq. It concerned at least one official in the administration of Prime Minister Tony Blair. "U.S. scrambling to establish a link between Iraq and al-Qaida is so far frankly unconvincing," according to one memo. "For Iraq, 'regime change' does not stack up. It sounds like a grudge between Bush and Saddam."

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