[theknife]

Originally Posted by albed

No need to hear others when you know everything.

Except what you need to know most.

sadly true. hopefully the next president won't be so tragically flawed.

but this explains a lot:

One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of Kuwait and he wasted it. 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. - George Bush, as told to Mickey Herskowitz, 1999 A Charge to Keep : My Journey to the White House

obviously, the Prez decided a long time ago that launching and waging war, preferably in Iraq, was a prerequisite to being a great president. he got all the political capital he needed on 9/11 and spent it in Iraq.

As told to Herskowitz, Bush and his advisors were quite impressed -- politically speaking, of course -- with the minor military victories of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (the Falklands War) and former presidents Ronald Reagan and dear old dad (the first Gulf War was a bad scene, as mentioned, but the Grenada and Panama “campaigns” were terrific political coups). Said Herskowitz of Bush & Co.’s view of Thatcher: "They were just absolutely blown away, just enthralled by the scenes of the troops coming back, of the boats, people throwing flowers at her and her getting these standing ovations in Parliament and making these magnificent speeches." Looking back further, they believed Jimmy Carter's political troubles emerged as the inherent result of a peaceful presidency.

ah, this explains Cheney's "dancing in the streets of Baghdad, greeting us as liberators" fantasy.

So what a successful presidency came down to for Bush, according to Herskowitz, was this: “Start a small war. Pick a country where there is justification you can jump on, go ahead and invade.” Once accomplished the chief executive will have secured the support needed for ramming through his domestic agenda. Seen through this lens, then, 9/11 for George W. Bush wasn’t so much tragedy as opportunity. He had his “chance to invade.”

which is why the Downing St. documents Minutes (they are actually not a memo, but rather minutes of a meeting with the head of British intelligence) dovetail perfectly with every aspect of the run-up to the war. from PMCarpenter:

the Bush interviews reveal that the president was genuinely fixated on war as a policy staple -- it would secure what you might call a permanent revolution. Nothing was to be left to chance. Peace presented a constant political threat.

Now of course we have the Downing Street Memo as proof that we would have war -- justified or not, necessary or not. Thousands of lives for “political capital” -- Bush's “basic essence.”