It really was Bush's war

Mickey Herskowitz is a long time author and journalist who specializes in "as told to" biographies. In other words he's a ghost writer. He was originally hired to perform that task on George Bush's campaign biography A Charge To Keep but he was eventually dropped from the project because the campaign didn't like his work. It seems he insisted on presenting an accurate reflection of events and reporting things that Bush actually told him. Karen Hughes eventually finished the book herself.

This information comes by way of a story at guerrilla news network (via, appropriately enough, Suburban Guerrilla) and there's more where that came from.

Two years before the September 11 attacks, presidential candidate George W. Bush was already talking privately about the political benefits of attacking Iraq, according to his former ghost writer, who held many conversations with then-Texas Governor Bush in preparation for a planned autobiography.

?He was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,? said author and journalist Mickey Herskowitz. ?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.?
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That President Bush and his advisers had Iraq on their minds long before weapons inspectors had finished their work ? and long before alleged Iraqi ties with terrorists became a central rationale for war ? has been raised elsewhere, including in a book based on recollections of former Treasury Secretary Paul O?Neill. However, Herskowitz was in a unique position to hear Bush?s unguarded and unfiltered views on Iraq, war and other matters ? well before he became president.

Combine that with the other stories that have surfaced recently which include the fact that General Tommy Franks was instructed as early as Feb. 2002 to begin pulling resources away from Afghanistan in preparation for an invasion of Iraq, and that the British received detailed plans for the war from the Americans fully five months before it began.

It was obvious to many of us at the time that all the deliberations and presentations to the UN were a sham and that the Bush administration was determined to invade. The question has always been why. The explanation provided from Herkowitz's comments is about as damning as any I can think of.

According to Herskowitz, who has authored more than 30 books, many of them jointly written autobiographies of famous Americans in politics, sports and media (including that of Reagan adviser Michael Deaver), Bush and his advisers were sold on the idea that it was difficult for a president to accomplish an electoral agenda without the record-high approval numbers that accompany successful if modest wars.
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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.?
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Herskowitz?s revelations are not the sole indicator of Bush?s pre-election thinking on Iraq. In December 1999, some six months after his talks with Herskowitz, Bush 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 the despot who remains in power after losing the Gulf War to Bush Jr.?s father?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. ?

There's more in the article including Bush's comments to Herskowitz about his National Guard service. This, too, is at odds with the official White House story.

There's also evidence provided in the piece about Herskowitz's credibility - it seems he has some. And frankly, there's nothing here that really surprises me.

This explanation would mean that Iraq can't in any way qualify as even a pre-emptive invasion. It would make it a war of choice for selfish political reasons. 100,000 Iraqi dead and who knows how many more wounded, 1,100 dead American troops and thousands more wounded, and all for the sake of increasing Bush's "political capital" so he could have a successful presidency.

There's your moral clarity, folks. There's your leadership. Even if you don't like John Kerry I'd suggest that he's the only way right now to get Bush out of the White House. And Job One right now is to end George Bush's influence on world events as quickly as possible.