O'Neill drinks the kool-aid

When Paul O'Neill was interviewed on "60 Minutes," he was asked if he was concerned about possible reaction from the White House. He kept insisting no, he wasn't concerned, in fact, he'd be surprised to be attacked. "Why would they attack me for telling the truth?"

Of course, with this crew, telling the truth is positively the surest way to get yourself attacked, but leaving that aside, I thought O'Neill's seeming naivete was actually a pose, a way to dampen the effects of attacks by allowing him to come on all wounded and shocked when they came.

But perhaps I was wrong, perhaps he didn't expect what he got. After a weekend in which the White House slugs and the Shrubberies attacked his service, his record, his personality, his loyalty, his integrity, and even his stability - but not, as I've noted previously, his accuracy - O'Neill is bending over backwards far enough to kiss his own Achilles tendons to show that golly gee whiz you really really got me all wrong. In an updated version of a CNN story I linked to yesterday, O'Neill now says

his account of the Bush administration's early discussions about a possible invasion of Iraq has been distorted by a "red meat frenzy."

The controversy began last week when excerpts were released from a book on the administration published Tuesday in which O'Neill suggests Iraq was the focus of President Bush's first National Security Council meeting.

That started what O'Neill described to NBC's "Today" show as a "red meat frenzy that's occurred when people didn't have anything except snippets."

Unfortunately for the Bushites, O'Neill's recantation may have come a bit too late. One sign is that the media have noticed that facile claim that all that was going on was, as O'Neill put it,

"a continuation of work that had been going on in the Clinton administration with the notion that there needed to be regime change in Iraq"

doesn't square with the description of Bush going "Find me a way to do this." As CNN notes, the Clinton policy

focused on funding and training Iraqi opposition groups rather than using military force.

That is, it depended on Iraqis overthrowing Saddam rather than on doing it ourselves. More importantly, another source has now backed up O'Neill's original version of the Bush administration's attitudes.

Jan. 13 - President Bush ordered the Pentagon to explore the possibility of a ground invasion of Iraq well before the United States was attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, an official told ABCNEWS, confirming the account former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill gives in a book written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind.

The official, who asked not to be identified, was present in the same National Security Council meetings as O'Neill immediately after Bush's inauguration in January and February of 2001.

"The president told his Pentagon officials to explore the military options, including use of ground forces," the official told ABCNEWS. "That went beyond the Clinton administration's halfhearted attempts to overthrow Hussein without force."

While this official and O'Neill both say that Bush hadn't actually decided to attack when he came into office, he was determined to get rid of Saddam Hussein one way or another.

Military force was definitely one of the options under consideration toward that end. The fact that Bush was surrounded by people who actively endorsed an invasion of Iraq plus the numerous reports that immediately after 9/11 people were being told to find a way to connect it to Iraq just serves to emphasize the fact that such action wanted only an excuse. Put it another way, it may even be technically true that an invasion wasn't decided on until after 9/11 - but that was only because they knew they had no basis to convince people to support it before then.

It seems at this point that the Bush defense comes down to "we weren't going to invade, but no cheaper, easier means of overthrowing Iraq and getting our claws into it came along, so...."

Which is pretty much the same thing as a mugger saying "well, I wasn't going to hold you up but your wallet didn't fall out of your pocket on its own, so...."