Almost as soon as George W. Bush took office in January 2001, he and his top advisors were plotting a regime change in Iraq, former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill told CBS' "60 Minutes." At Bush's first National Security Council meeting 10 days after the inauguration, O'Neill said going after Saddam Hussein was topic "A."
"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,'" said ONeill, who serves as the primary source for a new book about the Bush White House entitled "The Price of Loyalty." O'Neill told the book's author, former Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, that he was surprised that during the first National Security Council meeting questions like "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked. Suskind based his book on interviews with O'Neill and several other high level officials as well as 19,000 internal documents provided by O'Neill. Meanwhile a Washington Post editorial [3] warned that U.S. intelligence reports are losing credibility internationally "because of the mounting evidence that U.S. intelligence about Iraq was mistaken -- and because of the Bush administration's refusal to acknowledge it. ... [T]he latest Post report [4] strongly supports a conclusion that much of the case against Iraq made by President Bush and his top aides before the war was wrong." The Post calls for an investigation into why intelligence estimates on Iraq were so flawed.