About that ‘I didn’t want war’ pledge…

March 27, 2006

Last week, at a rare White House press conference, the president insisted that the idea he wanted to go to war with Iraq is absurd.

“I didn’t want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong…. No President wants war. Everything you may have heard is that, but it’s just simply not true.”

There are at least a half-dozen key examples that show the polar opposite. Bush was intent on an invasion, despite public comments about diplomacy, and despite historical revisionism last week. But in case yet another smoking gun would help make this point even clearer, the New York Times has quite a scoop today.

[B]ehind closed doors, the president was certain that war was inevitable. During a private two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Jan. 31, 2003, he made clear to Prime Minister Tony Blair of Britain that he was determined to invade Iraq without the second resolution, or even if international arms inspectors failed to find unconventional weapons, said a confidential memo about the meeting written by Mr. Blair’s top foreign policy adviser and reviewed by The New York Times.

“Our diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning,” David Manning, Mr. Blair’s chief foreign policy adviser at the time, wrote in the memo that summarized the discussion between Mr. Bush, Mr. Blair and six of their top aides.

“The start date for the military campaign was now penciled in for 10 March,” Mr. Manning wrote, paraphrasing the president. “This was when the bombing would begin.”

Now, at least from my perspective, on the outrage-o-meter, this is relatively mild. It’s compelling evidence that comports with everything we already knew. But the scandalous element here is what Bush was prepared to do to provoke a war.

The memo also shows that the president and the prime minister acknowledged that no unconventional weapons had been found inside Iraq. Faced with the possibility of not finding any before the planned invasion, Mr. Bush talked about several ways to provoke a confrontation, including a proposal to paint a United States surveillance plane in the colors of the United Nations in hopes of drawing fire, or assassinating Mr. Hussein. […]

“The U.S. was thinking of flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in U.N. colours,” the memo says, attributing the idea to Mr. Bush. “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach.”

It also described the president as saying, “The U.S. might be able to bring out a defector who could give a public presentation about Saddam’s W.M.D,” referring to weapons of mass destruction.

Bush wanted to go to war based on WMD, but he couldn’t find any. In an apparent fit of frustration and desperation, the president of the United States openly contemplated deliberate fraud — in the form of a fake U.N. plane or a lying defector.

Bush “didn’t want war”? I’m sure the White House “clarification” on this will be forthcoming. Any day now.

Go to the Downing Street Memos. They have been covering this for over a year

  • Bush didn’t want war, just as Hitler didn’t want war after he had already invaded Poland in September of 1939. But Hitler was saying “he didn’t want war” as the invasion of Poland was beginning—not three full years after the fact. I seem to recall Bush being rather upbeat about the pragmatics of taking out Saddam—or should I say “taking out the guy that cost “Daddy” his re-election bid?”

    Democracy has to be a “chosen” thing. When one government tries to ram it down the throats of another sovereign people, then it’s no longer Democracy; it’s the rote beginnings of a Fascist regime. Iraq is not a “Western” culture, so the western model of Democracy just won’t function there. Iraq needs to be given the opportunity to discover its own brand of Democracy—and Bush won’t want that to happen, either—because Bush is nothing more than another Saddam….

  • The context of the quote was Bush’s finger wagging browbeating directed at Helen Thomas’ question… Why did you want to go to war?

    “I didn’t want war. To assume I wanted war is just flat wrong…. No President wants war.

    is right up there with Clinton’s famous finger wag “I’didn’t have sexual relations with that woman”

    When Bush says
    ” Everything you may have heard is that, but it’s just simply not true.”

    Bush comes off as an angry liar lying to defend his lies.

  • Mr. C.B., can you tell us why it took the NYT more than three months to cover this, AFTER the British press had it all over the world? Why has the CCCP finally decided to breathlessly shout out this “old news” outrage? The news divisions of the NYT, just as with all of the other biggie papers, have become shills for BushCo, whether willingly or otherwise.

    “Whores” is too good a word for the NYT; they can join the the gang now wearing the label “Lying.Fucking.Bastards.”

  • Ah, George.

    Now you have to understand 😉 that W. here is making a broader point. He is a U.S. president and no U.S. president ever ‘wants to go to war’, therefore he did not ‘want to go to war’.

    But of course, war was unavoidable, because he had to:

    1) get rid of Saddam’s WMD, which were hidden so well that the U.N. inspectors couldn’t find them without U.S. Military help,

    or

    2) remove Saddam from power in accordance with the 1998 Congressional resolution calling for regime change in Iraq,

    or

    3) enforce the dignity of the United Nations against all of Saddam’s deceit and trickery,

    or

    4) avenge the attempt on his father’s life by Saddam.

    As you can see, any one of these reasons would make it impossible 😉 for W. to not go to war, as much as he did not ‘want to’.

    Bush doesn’t come off as an angry liar to me. He comes off as a reflexive and non-introspective jerk who doesn’t want to answer Helen Thomas’ real question. But he is not lying in the sense that he ‘knows’ what he is saying is wrong, even though it is.

  • The NYT is still “the paper of record” in the US. No matter how old that record is. It just doesn’t contain “news”. Not if that would require reportage or if it might upset those currently in power.

    I’ve paid for their “premium” on-line services since they began charging, and I’m beginning to wonder why. David Brooks? John Tierney? Thomas Friedman? Frank Rich (who’s good, but has been nowhere to be seen for months)? The editorial genius who finally conceded that the Bush-Blair discussions were newsworthy?

  • …can you tell us why it took the NYT more than three months to cover this…?

    It appears from the article that the Times waited until they had an opportunity to review the memo before publishing the story.

    Stamped “extremely sensitive,” the five-page memorandum, which was circulated among a handful of Mr. Blair’s most senior aides, had not been made public. Several highlights were first published in January in the book “Lawless World,” which was written by a British lawyer and international law professor, Philippe Sands. In early February, Channel 4 in London first broadcast several excerpts from the memo.

    Since then, The New York Times has reviewed the five-page memo in its entirety. While the president’s sentiments about invading Iraq were known at the time, the previously unreported material offers an unfiltered view of two leaders on the brink of war, yet supremely confident.

    It is not clear how recently the opportunity to review the memo occurred. Still I don’t think we should be too hard on the Times over this. If the British press had reported on a memo which put Bush in good light, I am fairly sure, most here would have wanted the Times to wait until they reviewed it before writing an article on it. As far as I am concerned, the Times has exercised good judgement on this.

  • George HW Bush has a public approval poll of 89% in February 1991 after we went to war with Saddam – OF COURSE his son wanted a war.

  • Bush was talking about wanting to invade Iraq before he was elected:

    Two Years Before 9/11, Candidate Bush was Already Talking Privately About Attacking Iraq, According to His Former Ghost Writer

    “He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. “It was on his mind. He said to me: ‘One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief.’ And he said, ‘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.” 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.”

    Bush saw invading as a crucial element of partisan political success before he was elected.

  • The context of the quote was Bush’s finger wagging browbeating directed at Helen Thomas’ question… Why did you want to go to war?

    Any bets on whether there will be a follow-up question at the next news conference? I’m guessing not.

  • We’re forgetting about the ol’ standby reason for war: enriching one’s friends and thereby creating political clients and opportunities for patronage down the road.

    It’s no coincidence that Bush’s friends in the defense industry and in the oil industry have helped themselves big-time. I’m sure they experienced a righteous pang of patriotism with each check Bush wrote them for their services. I’m modestly certain that some of these industries even pay taxes in exchange.

  • Does anyone else but me remember that scene in Fahrenheit 911 where Bush is shown punching the air with his fist when the bombs started falling on Baghdad? He sure looked like he wanted war to me.

  • Of course GW didn’t want to go to war. He just wants to ride his bike, watch tv, and take 3 hour naps during the afternoon.
    It’s Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the neocons who wanted to go to war. Bush is just the handpuppet that served their purpose.

  • As Marcus Alrealius Alrightus points out, Bush is on film punchingtheair with his fist when the war broke out. At the time his comment was “Feels good!”

    Sure sounds like someone who was very sad to have a war to fight to me….

  • can you tell us why it took the NYT more than three months to cover this, AFTER the British press had it all over the world?

    Probably for the same reason the NY Times sat on the NSA wiretap story for more than a year: It was embarrassing and potentially damaging to George W. Bush. Now that he is largely unpopular, they’ve decided to take a few pokes at him. What’s embarrassing is that this is really old news.

  • Easy to claim you don’t “want” war. Not easy to claim you don’t “need” war. Bush was caught up and committed to carryout the actions preceeded by his own and his administration’s rhetoric. In private meetings, Bush revealed his cards to visiting senators stating that he would “fuck Saddam”. After showing his guns, coopting Congress and the UN, putting the forces into the Gulf, Bush was not man enough to step back and question the need based on new evidence. For whatever personal or political reasons Bush needed war far more than Americans needed war. Bush has so far failed to convince Americans of exactly why his need for war translates into why Americans needed it. The question of want is an easy noose to slip for a slippery cowboy like Bush. But the noose just keeps getting tighter around the throat of America.

  • The facts do not prove that Bush did not want war. Just a few months after we invaded Afghanistan he was already moving troops and equipment with the intent to begin staging an invasion of Iraq. That was long before he had any sort of permission from this whimpy congress. If you read Richard Clark, or Paul O’Neil, or even Bob Woodward the facts do not support his claim. What blows my mind is how long it took the American media to call him on his lies. They still seem very afraid of him. Maybe the media is also on the take, like the Congress.

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