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Thread: Iraq War Planned Two Years Before 9/11

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    Iraq War Planned Two Years Before 9/11

    Iraq war planned two years before 9/11

    http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/con...ory.asp?id=233

    6/12/2005 9:45:00 AM GMT

    According to author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz, then presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq two years before September 11 occurred.

    "He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999," said President Bush's former ghost writer.

    "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."

    In 1999, Herskowitz struck a deal with the campaign of George W. Bush about a ghost-written autobiography, which was ultimately titled A Charge to Keep : My Journey to the White House, and he and Bush signed a contract in which the two would split the proceeds.

    Herskowitz was given unimpeded access to Bush, and the two met approximately 20 times so Bush could share his thoughts. Herskowitz began working on the book in May, 1999, and says that within two months he had completed and submitted some 10 chapters, with a remaining 4-6 chapters still on his computer. Herskowitz was replaced as Bush's ghostwriter after Bush's handlers concluded that the candidate's views and life experiences were not being cast in a sufficiently positive light.

    Bush's attitude toward Iraq emerged recently in two taped interviews of Herskowitz revealing the following:

    - In 2003, Bush's father indicated to him that he disagreed with his son's invasion of Iraq.

    - Bush admitted that he failed to fulfill his Vietnam-era domestic National Guard service obligation, but claimed that he had been "excused."

    - Bush revealed that after he left his Texas National Guard unit in 1972 under murky circumstances, he never piloted a plane again.

    - Bush described his own business ventures as "floundering" before campaign officials insisted on recasting them in a positive light.

    According to Herskowitz, George W. Bush's beliefs on Iraq were based in part on a notion dating back to the Reagan White House - ascribed in part to now-vice president Dick Cheney, Chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee under Reagan. "Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade."

    Bush's circle of pre-election advisers had a fixation on the political capital that British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher collected from the Falklands War. Said Herskowitz: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at [Thatcher] and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches."

    Republicans, Herskowitz said, felt that Jimmy Carter's political downfall could be attributed largely to his failure to wage a war. He noted that President Reagan and President Bush's father himself had (besides the narrowly-focused Gulf War I) successfully waged limited wars against tiny opponents - Grenada and Panama - and gained politically. But there were successful small wars, and then there were quagmires, and apparently George H.W. Bush and his son did not see eye to eye.

    "I know [Bush senior] would not admit this now, but he was opposed to it. I asked him if he had talked to W about invading Iraq. "He said, 'No I haven't, and I won't, but Brent [Scowcroft] has.' Brent would not have talked to him without the old man's okaying it." Scowcroft, national security adviser in the elder Bush's administration, penned a highly publicized warning to George W. Bush about the perils of an invasion.

    Other indications on the direction George W. Bush was about to take came in December 1999, when he surprised veteran political chroniclers, including the Boston Globe 's David Nyhan, with his blunt pronouncements about Saddam at a six-way New Hampshire primary event that got little notice:

    "It was a gaffe-free evening for the rookie front-runner, till he was asked about Saddam's weapons stash," wrote Nyhan. 'I'd take 'em out,' [Bush] grinned cavalierly, 'take out the weapons of mass destruction, I'm surprised he's still there," said Bush of Saddam Hussein. It remains to be seen if that offhand declaration of war was just Texas talk, a sort of locker room braggadocio, or whether it was Bush's first big clinker. "

    The notion that President Bush held unrealistic or naïve views about the consequences of war was further advanced recently by a Bush supporter, the evangelist Pat Robertson, who revealed that Bush had told him the Iraq invasion would yield no casualties.

    In the end, campaign officials decided not to go with Herskowitz's account, and, moreover, demanded everything back. "The lawyer called me and said, 'Delete it. Shred it. Just do it.' "
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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    Bush campaign cans biographer
    Manuscript haphazard, claims one source; too candid, says another.

    http://archive.salon.com/books/log/1...27/herskowitz/

    By Craig Offman

    Sept. 27, 1999 | Recently George W. Bush's presidential campaign team revealed that it had fired Mickey Herskowitz, whom it had hired to write the candidate's authorized biography, and replaced him with the campaign's communications director, Karen Hughes. But for those who may sniff intrigue in Texas, you won't find any dark conspiracy on this grassy knoll.

    "Mickey got things off to a great start. It was initially his idea. The contract called for the book to be delivered in mid-July, but at the end of July we only had a few chapters," Bush campaign spokesman Scott McClellan said in an interview. "That's when we decided to make a change." According to the book's publisher, William Morrow and Company, "A Charge to Keep" is still slated for November.

    In a recent article in the London Sunday Telegraph, an anonymous source suggested that the campaign team dismissed Herskowitz because they wanted a less candid book about the candidate's policies. "His campaign does not want [Bush] dealing in any way with the issues, or the specifics on the issues," the source claimed. But another source blamed Herskowitz's haphazard manuscript for the firing.

    Herskowitz has co-written many books, including "The Camera Never Blinks: Adventures of a TV Journalist," with CBS News anchor Dan Rather, and "A Fairway to Heaven: My Lessons From Harvey Penick on Golf and Life," with golfer Tom Kite. He has also co-written a book with another Texas governor: the 1993 "In History's Shadow: An American Odyssey," with the late John Connally. Currently a sports writer at the Houston Chronicle, Herskowitz approached Bush with the proposal for the biography. "I've been a friend of Gov. Bush's for most of the past 30 years," Herskowitz says. "The resolution of the book didn't end in an unfriendly way, at least not for me." But the resolution for the Bush campaign may well be a flat book.

    Owing, perhaps, to the blandness of the race for the Republican nomination, the candidates' campaign books have received a lot of scrutiny in the past few months. Arizona Sen. John McCain's "Faith of My Fathers," the Random House title in which the senator recalls his grueling experience as a North Vietnamese POW, is No. 2 on the Oct. 3 New York Times bestseller list, and may yet reach No. 1. The isolationism of Patrick J. Buchanan's "A Republic, Not an Empire," from Regnery Publishing, has generated plenty of controversy in both the Republican and the Reform parties. Dan Quayle's book, "Worth Fighting For," wrangled some attention last July when Random House turned it down. (Word Publishing then picked it up.) In her rejection letter to the former vice president, Random House editor in chief Ann Godoff wrote, "I just don't want to be a party to the promulgation of ideas I disagree with so profoundly."

    The Bush campaign, on the other hand, seems bent on blandness. According to the Sunday Telegraph article, Karen Hughes is drafting a lengthy section that will describe Bush's political beliefs. In other words, you won't find any wild-youth accounts here. Yet while the Bush camp grapples with its substance issues, a number of books about Bush's life loom on the horizon, several of which will undoubtedly touch upon the allegations of youthful misconduct that have dogged the governor's campaign. Bill Minutaglio's "First Son: George W. Bush and the Bush Family Dynasty," from Times Books, will be on the stands next month. Hyperion brings out former George executive editor Elizabeth Mitchell's "W.: The Rise, Fall and Rise of the Bush Dynasty" in January. And Random House publishes Molly Ivins' "Shrub: The Short but Happy Political Life of George W. Bush" in February.
    salon.com | Sept. 27, 1999
    No One Knows Everything. Only Together May We Find The Truth JG


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