Posted on 04/17/2004 9:54:17 AM PDT by rocklobster11
The media are jumping on the old "Bush was planning to go to War with Iraq from Day 1" story again with the release of Bob Woodwards new book. They are reporting as if it is significant new news that Bush asked the Pentagon to prepare Iraq war plans at the end of November, 2001.
In reality, this is an old story, as evidenced in Wesley Clark's book, Winning Modern Wars, published in October, 2003. Here’s what he writes on page 130:
"As I went back through the Pentagon in November 2001, one of the senior military staff officers had time for a chat. Yes, we were still on track for going against Iraq, he said. But there was more. This was being discussed as part of a five-year campaign plan, he said, and there were a total of seven countries, beginning with Iraq, then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Iran, Somalia, and Sudan." Clark adds, "I left the Pentagon that afternoon deeply concerned."
Here's an article from December, 2001 describing the pentagon's planning about Iraq: The Iraq Hawks
The article is long, and describes a plan Chalabi's INC developed. Here's a few paragraphs of interest:
Before September 11th, according to one of Chalabi's advisers, the I.N.C.'s war plan revolved around training, encouraging defectors, and American enforcement of the no-fly zone in southern Iraq. The idea was to recruit two hundred instructors and put them to work training a force of five thousand or more dissident Iraqis, reinforced by soldiers of fortune, some of whom, inevitably, would be retired Americans who had served in Special Forces units. The United States would also be asked to institute a no-drive zone, backed up by air strikes, to protect the insurgents from attack by Iraqi tanks.
snip
Then came September 11th, and the quick victories in Afghanistan, where the combination of internal rebellion, intense bombing, and Special Forces deployment turned the Taliban out of power within weeks. Ahmad Chalabi has now given the Bush Administration an updated war plan, which calls not only for bombing but for the deployment of thousands of American Special Forces troops.
snip
In recent weeks, Chalabi's revised war plan, augmented and modified by a Pentagon planning group authorized by Paul Wolfowitz, has made its way to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for evaluation. It has left some military men cold, and prompted a debate about the lessons learned from Afghanistan and how they can be applied to Saddam. "There's no question we can take him down," a former government official told me. "But what do you need to do it? The J.C.S. is feeling the pressure. These guys are being squeezed so hard."
snip
The military's response has been cautious and bureaucratic. A former official told me that the Joint Chiefs ordered their staff to "come up with a counterproposal," which is now in the planning stages. An Air Force consultant said that the I.N.C. is not included in the Pentagon's planning, adding, "Everything is going to happen inside Iraq, and Chalabi is going to be on the outside." According to a senior Bush Administration official, two senior American diplomats were recently sent to northern Iraq to talk to Kurdish opposition leaders and "check out who's got go and who's got no go."
snip
President Bush has not yet decided what to do about Iraq<, according to the senior Administration official. Until he has, he said, the State Department will continue to give financial support to opposition groups, including the I.N.C. In a Washington Post interview earlier this fall, Condoleezza Rice used a football metaphor to indicate that all options remain open. "We will be calling audibles every time we come to the line," she told the columnist Jim Hoagland.
So this is nothing new, just another thing being rehashed by the media during an election year in hopes that nobody remembers the past
Of course the question has several answers when you're a marxist or the marxists' media shill.
Here's an interesting admission from a NY Times article, titled Powell Said to Have Warned Bush Before the War, a New Book Says
But the general time line for war planning that is presented in the book is broadly consistent with other recent accounts, including public statements by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, the retired commander of the Iraq war. It generally upholds the insistence by Mr. Bush and his top advisers that they did not begin their war planning for Iraq until well after the Sept. 11 attacks, even if their attention was fixed on Iraq from early in the administration, as former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill has written in a recent book.
And for a little humor, you can't beat this paragraph from the same article:
Over a period that began in early 2002, Mr. Powell is depicted as having cautioned Mr. Bush and other advisers repeatedly about the potential drawbacks of military action in Iraq. The "you break it, you own it" principle he cited in delivering those warnings was privately known to Mr. Powell and his deputy, Richard L. Armitage, as "the Pottery Barn rule," the book says.
Hey! He stole that "deeply concerned" line from Orin Hatch!
Who does he think he is, Joe Biden?
He was so deeply concerned that he failed to mention it as a CNN analyst in the run up to the War, and only discussed it in his book when he decided to run for president
Though usually I consider myself moderately savvy, I can honestly say that I haven't got the slightest idea what the "issue" here is.
It's some sort of concept that exists all by itself in a hidden, low-traffic corner of the universe and is utterly unrelated to anything except the vacuum of space that surrounds it.
I've heard a couple people parrot "Bush was going to go to war with Iraq from day 1" and frankly, I haven't responded to them because the only thing I can think of to respond with is "What the f*ck are you saying? What does that string of words that just came out of your mouth mean? I know it's not a foreign language because I understand each word individually but, when you put them together the way you just put them together, none of them makes any sense at all."
I've come to the conclusion that "Bush was going to go to war with Iraq from day 1" is the liberal equivalent of baby-talk.
I'm not saying that in an attempt to be funny. The phrase simply has no rational, intellectual meaning.
Planning for contingencies and operationalizing such plans are two distinct concepts. Maybe that's an overload on liberal minds, except, of course when it comes to the central planning that is their stock-in-trade.
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