  I can't tell you how many people greeted my pre-war protests with affirmations that the administration had a very good reason for this that they just couldn't' share. My neighbor whose husband had served in the Army, my aunt and uncle who had served in the Air Force, just to name a few, truly believed. They needed to believe. But CBS aired Rumsfeld notes to his aide from the morning of 9/11 with the phrase "sweep Iraq" showing that even then the opportunist in him knew to use this tragedy as an excuse to recreate in a sickly Freudian way his unresolved conflict. Rumsfeld and Cheney were in charge of Gulf War I, it was their failure. This was their chance to right their wrong.
I think its poetic irony worthy of Shakespeare himself that getting what they wanted most of all will be their undoing. I'm just sorry so many people, innocent Iraqis and young Americans alike, had to die in the effort.
urlLink Boston.com / News / Nation / Bush began Iraq plan pre-9/11, O'Neill says : "WASHINGTON -- President Bush and his senior aides began plotting the invasion of Iraq just days after he took office in January 2001 and not, as the administration has indicated, after terrorists struck against the United States eight months later, according to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, who was forced from his post in December 2002. In an interview scheduled to air tonight on CBS News' '60 Minutes,' O'Neill derided what he considered the administration's intent from the start to remove Saddam Hussein by force.
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