{"id":1085,"date":"2004-01-14T10:30:55","date_gmt":"2004-01-14T15:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1085.html"},"modified":"2004-01-14T10:30:55","modified_gmt":"2004-01-14T15:30:55","slug":"if-the-iraq-war-has-been-three-years-in-the-making","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/if-the-iraq-war-has-been-three-years-in-the-making\/","title":{"rendered":"If the Iraq war has been three years in the making…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know Paul O’Neill is slowly backing away<\/a> from his earlier remarks about Bush drawing up war plans immediately upon taking office, but something funny struck me about O’Neill’s earlier comments.<\/p>\n

Originally, you may recall, O’Neill characterized the administration as looking for an excuse to justify an invasion.<\/p>\n

“From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein is a bad person and that he needed to go,” O’Neill told 60 Minutes. “From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime.” O’Neill added, “It was all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president saying, ‘Go find me a way to do this.'”<\/p>\n

Indeed, based on information O’Neill provided, Ron Suskind explained that just weeks after Bush’s inauguration, the administration was making plans for war crime tribunals in Iraq, even discussing how best to divide up Iraq’s oil.<\/p>\n

Which leads me to wonder: If administration officials have been working on a plan to invade and occupy Iraq for three years, why are they so very bad at it?<\/p>\n

I mean, one might assume that a group of high-ranking government officials, with the backing of the world’s most powerful military and an unparalleled leadership role in international affairs, would have been able to get this thing right after working on a plan for three years. Oh well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know Paul O’Neill is slowly backing away from his earlier remarks about Bush drawing up war plans immediately upon taking office, but something funny struck me about O’Neill’s earlier comments. Originally, you may recall, O’Neill characterized the administration as looking for an excuse to justify an invasion. “From the very beginning, there was a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1085"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1085\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}