This morning on Meet The Press with Tim Russert, Condaleezza Rice unwittingly blew Bushco’s cover by asserting the real reasons the hawks decided to invade Iraq. It is, of course, what we all suspected for a very long time. But, having Rice admit it publicly adds a lot more fuel to the fire of those who do not support this illegal war.
But the fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al-Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al-Qaeda and perhaps after the Taliban and then our work would be done and we would try to defend ourselves.
Or we could take a bolder approach, which was to say that we had to go after the root causes of the kind of terrorism that was produced there, and that meant a different kind of Middle East.
The fix was in. Every attempt made by the Bush administration to tie Saddam Hussein to Al Quaeda was just a smokescreen. They had already made the decision to invade Iraq.
You can view the video at Crooks and Liars or read the transcript here.
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The war on Iraq was posited as a war of self-defense against terrorism, spun by the propaganda machine at the White House to rally support for the illegal invasion and based on “grave threats” by Hussein’s regime. We now know there were no grave threats, there were no connections to Al Quaeda and it’s quite obvious that the administration knew that at the time as well.
Richard Clarke and so many others were right about the fact that the Iraq war planning was well underway even before 9/11 and Rice has now admitted it.