WASHINGTON, 15 January 2004 — It has yet to be dubbed “O’Neill Gate”, but a book by former Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill that charges that US President George W. Bush had plans to invade Iraq well before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, has all the makings of a scandal that won’t go away any time soon.
There is no telling how much damage the book will do to Bush in an election year during which every move is scrutinized and every claim checked and double-checked.
If nothing else, Democrats, who this month formally launch the process to select a candidate to oppose Bush in the November election, are sure to try to keep the issue alive and use it to their advantage.
Frontrunner Howard Dean, who has been a vocal opponent of the war, was quick to issue a statement calling on Bush to respond.
“The country deserves to know — and the president needs to answer — why the American people were presented with misleading or manufactured intelligence as to why going to war with Iraq was necessary,” Dean said in a statement.
One of Dean’s closest rivals, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, said: “It would mean the (Bush administration) ... deliberately lied to the American people, Congress, and the world,” Kerry said in a statement. “The White House needs to answer these charges truthfully because they threaten to shatter (its) already damaged credibility as never before.”
O’Neill is the highest-ranking US official to spill the beans, and his just-released book, “The Price of Loyalty”, written by Wall Street Journal reporter Ron Suskind, and interviews promoting his book have offered a rare glimpse into closed-door meetings that shape the world.
Among the more important claims: Bush had planned to go to war with Iraq all along; Bush led Cabinet meetings like “a blind man in a room full of deaf people”; and there was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
“In the 23 months I was there, I never saw anything that I would characterize as evidence of weapons of mass destruction,” O’Neill, who will not benefit financially from the book, told Time magazine in an interview. “There were allegations and assertions by people ... To me there is real evidence and everything else. And I never saw anything in the intelligence that I would characterize as real evidence.”
A book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, “Bush at War”, also attempted to go behind the scenes, using notes taken during National Security Council meetings and other confidential memos. The book, published in November 2002, focused on the three months following the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington and analyzed Bush’s leadership style with what may have been unprecedented access for a journalist.
But while Woodward’s book offered unknown details, it didn’t have the scathing criticism from a former Cabinet member as is the case in the “The Price of Loyalty”.
The Bush White House, known as one of the most secretive administrations ever, has been quick to do damage control, ranging from questioning O’Neill’s motives to launching an investigation into whether he leaked secret papers.
Conservative pundits have repeatedly called O’Neill a disgruntled former employee who is trying to get even with his former boss.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters that the book “appears to be more about trying to justify personal views and opinions than it does about looking at the results that we are achieving on behalf of the American people.”
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld on Tuesday also vigorously supported the president, saying his own experience with Bush was “night and day” from what O’Neill wrote.
“The idea that he came into office with a predisposition to invade Iraq, I think is a total misunderstanding of the situation,” Rumsfeld said at a briefing.
Bush has defended the regime-change policy in Iraq, saying that plans to topple former Iraqi president Saddam Hussein predated his administration. It was President Bill Clinton in 1998 who formulated the policy after international weapons inspectors were expelled from Iraq, Bush said.
“Like the previous administration, we were for regime change,” Bush said. “Then all of a sudden Sept. 11 hit. As the president of the United States, my most solemn obligation is to protect the security of my people.”
The current White House has been criticized for implying that the Iraq invasion was related to stopping more attacks by the terrorist network Al-Qaeda. But there has been little evidence that Osama Bin Laden had ties to Iraq.
Whatever the case, the book has surely kicked off a season ahead of the November election when scandals and wannabe scandals are part of the political landscape.
