Explain to me why this will not lead every news broadcast...

This should have been a bombshell but has been treated like a popgun.

New York (Reuters, January 11) - Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill charges in a new book that President Bush entered office in January 2001 intent on invading Iraq and was in search of a way to go about it. ...

To go to war, Bush used the argument that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and had to be stopped in the post-Sept. 11, 2001, world. The weapons have never been found.

"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 scheduled to air on Sunday. "For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap." ...

The former treasury secretary and other White House insiders gave Suskind documents that in the first three months of 2001 revealed the Bush administration was examining military options for removing Saddam Hussein, CBS said.

"There are memos," Suskind told CBS. "One of them marked 'secret' says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq."'

Another Pentagon document entitled "Foreign suitors for Iraqi Oil Field Contracts" talks about contractors from 40 countries and which ones have interest in Iraq, Suskind said.

O'Neill was also quoted in the book as saying the president was determined to find a reason to go to war and he was surprised that nobody on the National Security Council questioned why Iraq should be invaded.

"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."'

Just to be absolutely clear: O'Neill is saying flat out that the Iraq war had nothing to do with terrorism, nothing to do with security, nothing to do with WMDs, nothing to do with anything else we were told. And by implication, then, that the Bush crowd also, with incredible, cold-blooded cynicism, politically exploited the murders of 3,000 Americans on 9/11 by falsely linking Iraq to al-Qaeda to justify a war they had decided on long before.

None of that, of course, comes as a shock to many of us. But the voice speaking this time is so mainstream - a former Treasury Secretary - that it should rouse the media from its lethargy.

Scott McClellan of course, denied the whole thing with an ad hominem attack, saying "the world according to Mr. O'Neill is...about trying to justify his own opinions." Meanwhile, another White House aide was quoted as calling O'Neill's claims "laughable" because "nobody listened to him while he was here, why should they start now?" Those are actually pretty feeble (i.e., ineffective) responses and I suspect they were almost off-the-cuff, the party line not having yet been established. I think the Shrubberies are waiting to see how much traction the story has before going after it, figuring anything they say now will only get it play, which is the last thing they want.

The GOP spin machine has gone into first gear, though, just in case. The emerging notions seem to be first to use the word "disgruntled" in every sentence and to say that "of course there were contingency plans, everyone has contingency plans, it'd be irresponsible if we didn't have contingency plans, having contingency plans is vital to protecting the safety of American citizens..." and you get the idea. It's still possible that if the story does stay alive we'll start hearing vague rumors about the "emotional stress" O'Neill suffered during and after his stay in the Cabinet (the article quoted here said he spent "a difficult two years in Washington"), but I'm not sure how effective that would be against a book backed up by, news reports acknowledge, 19,000 documents. That is, O'Neill's personal credibility is not on the line.

So I think the "contingency plans" defense will be the focus. In anticipation of that, note well:

con-tin-gen-cy n., 1.a. An event that may occur but that is not likely or intended; a possibility. b. A possibility that must be prepared for; a future emergency. 2. The condition of being dependent on chance; uncertainty. 3. Something incidental to something else. - American Heritage Dictionary

"Contingency plans" are what you prepare and have around to answer the question "what will we do if X happens?"

What O'Neill describes are not contingency plans (a prepared response to an emerging situation) but action plans, plans intended to create a situation, in this case that of overrunning Iraq. The only contingency involved was "what excuse can we use to justify this?"

Connecting this, as some have tried to so, to the political posturing of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998 (which declared "regime change" in Iraq as national policy) is silly on its face, particularly since that act did not, as I recall, envision a unilateral (which this one was, for all practical purposes) invasion as a means to that end. Nor do I think the GOPers will go with that, since a defense of "just carrying out previous policy" will be just too jarringly inconsistent to the ears of the electorate with what we told in the runup to the war.

Update: Whoops, maybe I've been shot down already. Apparently, CNN is reporting that the White House is saying O'Neill didn't have the access necessary to make the claims he's making. But since he apparently provided supporting documents to the book's author, I'm not sure how high that will fly. Perhaps this is just to set up a later claim of "O'Neill just couldn't understand the meaning of the documents because he had no access to give them context; they were contingency plans," and I'd be right after all.

Which, of course, is what's really important here.