Bush had planned to attack and invade Iraq even before he stole the election of 2000. The public record is replete with direct, verifiable evidence of this as well as coincidences of the truly GOP kind. To wit:
- Insiders ""Richard Clarke and Paul O'Neill ""have stated that the Bush administration was focused on invading Iraq from the outset. [See CBS News: Bush Sought 'Way' To Invade Iraq? ]
- Evan as George Bush was assuming the Oval Office, someone did a "Watergate" on the Niger Embassy in Italy, that is to say: it was burglarized.
- Bob Woodward ""in "Plan of Attack" ""described a Saudi government offer of some $1 billion to the Bush administration for what were called "...joint intelligence operations" designed to overthrow Saddam Hussein by April of 2002. [See Bob Woodward, Plan of Attack, Page 229]
- The deal was sweetened. Saudi Prince Bandar promised that Saudi Arabia would lower crude oil prices prior to the Presidential re-election campaign.
What may be most disturbing about this eye-opening timeline of atrocity, aggressive war, and phony terrorism is that it may stem from a deep-seated neurosis that has its origins in Bush's festering resentment of his father. "He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz.
'My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it.' He said, '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."Other revelations from Herskowitz included a laundry list of Bush neuroses:
Herskowitz said that Bush expressed frustration at a lifetime as an underachiever in the shadow of an accomplished father. In aggressive military action, he saw the opportunity to emerge from his father's shadow. The moment, Herskowitz said, came in the wake of the September 11 attacks. "Suddenly, he's at 91 percent in the polls, and he'd barely crawled out of the bunker."""Russ Baker, Common Dreams
Not surprisingly, Bush Jr would exorcise his demons with an old strategy that had its origin in the Ronald Reagan administration. It was, according to Herskowitz, Dick Cheney who summed it all up long before 911:
- In 2003, Bush's father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son's invasion of Iraq.
- Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been "excused."
- Bush revealed that after he left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972 under murky circumstances, he never piloted a plane again. That casts doubt on the carefully-choreographed moment of Bush emerging in pilot's garb from a jet on the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to celebrate "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq. The image, instantly telegraphed around the globe, and subsequent hazy White House statements about his capacity in the cockpit, created the impression that a heroic Bush had played a role in landing the craft.
- Bush described his own business ventures as "floundering" before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light.
""Russ Baker, Common Dreams
Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.It's bad enough that Bush has tried to work out his personal problems by sending U.S. Troops to their deaths, he has, in fact, murdered tens of thousands of innocent Iraqis and he has tried repeatedly to justify the American aggression against Iraq with numerous ex post facto rationales ""all of them lies.""Dick Cheney [as quoted by author Mickey Herskowitz]
Thus Bush's presidency becomes the story of a pathetic, insecure little man who because he had a personal problem with his "daddy" would defraud the citizens of the United States and the world; he would send U.S. troops in harm's way; he would order an illegal war that would kill thousands of innocent Iraqis ""citizens of a sovereign nation that had nothing whatsoever to do with 911. Bush would do all this and, in the process, place himself above the law, the judiciary and the legislative. He did it all to keep his fraud intact, to hide his lie, to shore up his own flagging self-esteem.
