The U.S. Democrats need to advertise Bush's lies about Iraq: here's proof

That information turned out to be grossly inaccurate but it was cited by Vice President Dick Cheney during a speech in 2002 as a means to build the case for war.

However, O’Neill’s allegations that Bush planned an Iraq invasion prior to 9-11 are backed up by dozens of on-the-record statements and speeches made by the president’s senior advisers, including Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice, during Bush’s first four months in office.

In dozens of transcripts posted on the Defense Department’s web site between January and May 2001, months before 9-11, Rumsfeld said the United States needed to be prepared for surprises, such as launching preemptive wars against countries like Iraq.

“If you think about it, Dick Cheney's (Secretary of Defense) confirmation hearing in 1989 -- not one United States senator mentioned a word about Iraq,” Rumsfeld said in a May 25, 2001 interview with PBS’ NewsHour. “The word "Iraq" was never mentioned in his entire confirmation hearing. One year later we're at war with Iraq. Now, what does that tell you? Well, it tells you that you'd best be flexible; you'd best expect the unexpected.”

In fact, Rumsfeld discusses the above scenario in a half-dozen other interviews in May 2001 and appears to suggest, by specifically mentioning Iraq, that history would eventually repeat itself.

Responding to a reporter’s question on January 26, 2001 about the Bush administration’s policy toward Saddam Hussein’s regime days after his Senate confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld said “I think that the policy of the country is that it is not helpful to have Saddam Hussein's regime in office.”

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2001 President Bush also alluded to the possibility of war, although he did not mention Iraq by name.

“We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors,” Bush said. “The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake … We will defend our allies and our interests.”

Further evidence suggests that when the Bush administration took office it was worried that the U.S. was losing international support for the sanctions it placed on Iraq ten years earlier leaving the door open to the possibility that Saddam Hussein would be let out of his proverbial box. President Bush sent Powell on a trip to the Middle East in late February 2001 to study the situation in Iraq to decide whether the administration should keep the sanctions in place or whether it should start to lay the groundwork for a preemptive strike.

But Powell returned to the U.S. and championed the sanctions saying, Iraq posed absolutely no threat to the U.S., during testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8, 2001, much to the dismay of Vice President Cheney, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom believed in using military force to oust Saddam Hussein.

“When we took over on the 20th of January, I discovered that we had an Iraq policy that was in disarray, and the sanctions part of that policy was not just in disarray; it was falling apart,” Powell said during his Senate testimony. “We were losing support for the sanctions regime that had served so well over the last ten years, with all of the ups and downs and with all of the difficulties that are associated that regime, it was falling apart. It had been successful. Saddam Hussein has not been able to rebuild his army, notwithstanding claims that he has. He has fewer tanks in his inventory today than he had 10 years ago. Even though we know he is working on weapons of mass destruction, we know he has things squirreled away, at the same time we have not seen that capacity emerge to present a full-fledged threat to us.”

In an interview with broadcast journalist Charlie Rose last Wednesday, Richard Perle, the former chairman of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board and one of the major architects of the war against Iraq, lent further credibility to the claim that one of the reasons Iraq became a target for invasion was because support for sanctions were eroding.