This news had hardly cooled off, when news of Paul O'Neill's tell-all book (CBS and Time articles) came out about his days in the White House, not only painting a very unflattering portrait of Bush's leadership (or lack thereof), but also saying that the administration started planning the Iraq invasion from almost day one, and that O'Neill himself never saw any hard intelligence supporting the administration's pre-war claims against Iraq before he left in December of 2002. (The administration's subsequent claim that O'Neill was not in a need-to-know position is laughable. O'Neill was a member of the National Security Council.)
And just when you'd think the administration couldn't have had a worse week, out comes a 56-page report published by Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute claiming that the Iraq not only was an unnecessary and ill-advised distraction to the war on terror, but that it had significantly damaged the American military by severely over-stretching its resourses. The report, called "Bounding the Global War on Terrorism" [373 KB PDF] was written by visiting professor Dr. Jeffrey Record, who believes "that the war on terrorism--as opposed to the campaign against al-Qaeda--lacks strategic clarity, embraces unrealistic objectives, and may not be sustainable over the long haul," and "calls for downsizing the scope of the war on terrorism to reflect concrete U.S. security interests and the limits of American military power."
Had enough yet? Hold on. The American Conservative's January 19th issue will feature the third and final installment of former Pentagon insider Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski's exposé on the Neocon's disinformation campaign there, "Open Door Policy: A strange thing happened on the way to the war":
Soon after, I was out-processed for retirement and couldn’t have been more relieved to be away from daily exposure to practices I had come to believe were unconstitutional. War is generally crafted and pursued for political reasons, but the reasons given to Congress and the American people for this one were so inaccurate and misleading as to be false. Certainly, the neoconservatives never bothered to sell the rest of the country on the real reasons for occupation of Iraq—more bases from which to flex U.S. muscle with Syria and Iran, better positioning for the inevitable fall of the regional sheikdoms, maintaining OPEC on a dollar track, and fulfilling a half-baked imperial vision. These more accurate reasons could have been argued on their merits, and the American people might indeed have supported the war. But we never got a chance to debate it.And all of this in just seven days?
Now, I don't know about you, but this all strikes me as a bit odd. This is far too much and far too fast for an administration so practiced in the black art of press control. Maybe it is all coincidence, maybe some of it is, or maybe none of it is, but with the President's State of the Union address right around the corner, I'm suspecting a fly in the ointment. There are simply too many insiders doing too much talking all at once and too many others letting them. My guess is that Daddy's CIA is lurking somewhere around the edges here, with the Plame Affair probably being the straw that broke that camel's back. Payback's are a bitch.
One thing is certain however. The President's speechwriters will be working a lot of overtime in the coming days. Too bad they don't get paid time-and-a-half, huh?
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