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Journalism of Courage
Former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill charges in a new book that President George Bush entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq and was looking for a way to go about it.
O’Neill, who was fired in December 2002 as part of a shake-up of Bush’s economic team, has become the first major Bush administration insider to launch an attack on the President.
He likened Bush at Cabinet meetings to ‘‘a blind man in a room full of deaf people’’, according to excerpts from a CBS interview to promote a book by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, The Price of Loyalty.
Bush used the argument that Iraq possessed WMDs and had to be stopped in the post-9/ 11 world. ‘‘From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go,’’ O’Neill said in the 60 Minutes interview. ‘‘For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the US has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.’’
‘‘There are memos,’’ Suskind told CBS. ‘‘One of them marked ‘secret’ says ‘Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq’.’’ A Pentagon document entitled ‘‘Foreign suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts’’ is about contractors who are interested in Iraq.”
‘‘It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it,’’ said O’Neill. ‘‘The President saying ’Go find me a way to do this.’” White House spokesman Scott McClellan rejected O’Neill’s remarks. ‘‘While we’re not in the business of book reviews, it appears that the world according to Mr O’Neill is more about trying to justify his own opinions than the reality of the results,’’ McClellan said.
