- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
JW: "In retrospect, though, it seems clear that he arrived in the White House surrounded by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and other twisted neocons who were determined to topple Saddam Hussein given any excuse, or none at all."
==============================================================
"In retrospect...?"
C'mon Joan, you know better.
Jeez--If anyone had taken the time to read the Project for a New American Century's "Rebuilding America's Defenses: Strategies, Forces, and Resources For a New Century," published before the 2000 election, authored by Wolfowitz, and signed by these very same people (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Perle, Libby, et al), one would have readily seen that this group was--before even coming to power--advocating the invasion of Iraq, the overthrow of Saddam, and the building of permanent U.S. military bases in the aftermath.
The PNAC report was there for the press, the pundits, the talking-heads, and the bloggers to see--in advance. It got virtually no attention--before or after the election. Yet, according to members of the Bush White House, the PNAC's plans for the overthrow of Saddam were discussed at the very first major White House meeting in 2001.
Heck, the PNAC's report was merely an expanded version of this same group's open letter to Clinton in 1998 advocating the same thing. So, in reality, this group's intentions were there for the world to see for several years.
So to say that it is only apparent "in retrospect" that this group of people would employ this particular (and devastingly disastrous) strategy is to willfully ignore the public availability of this document--a veritable blueprint for what the Bush White House would do when it came to power.
Moreover, to say that this published plan was only apparent "in retrospect" is to willfully ignore the media's role in failing to spotlight the PNAC plan when it mattered most--before the election in 2000, and again before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
