In my travels on the intertubes this past week I somehow found myself reading this article in the Journal of the Middle East Policy Council written by W. Patrick Lang. He was Defense Information Officer for the Middle East during part of both Bush the elder, smarter and Clinton administrations. The article is 22 pages long, but it reads like it's much shorter. It's an engrossing step-by-step account of just how the intelligence was massaged to sell the Iraq war. As Lang puts it:

The sincerely held beliefs of a small group of people who think they are the "bearers" of a uniquely correct view of the world, sought to dominate the foreign policy of the United States in the Bush 43 administration, and succeeded in doing so through a practice of excluding all who disagreed with them. Those they could not drive from government they bullied and undermined...

I don't think anyone who's been paying attention the last 6 years can reasonably argue with that assessment. Bullying is their preferred method of stifling dissent and the right wing noise machine is always ready to call anyone who dares question their motives a coward and a traitor. Lang covers a lot of ground in showing how this administration came into office with a goal and used 9/11 to realize that goal. I highly recommend reading the whole thing. I'm just looking back through it and I could cut and paste all day, but I'll just leave you with these two paragraphs:

Sometime in the spring of 2000, Stephen Hadley, ..., briefed a group of prominent Republican party policymakers on the national-security and foreign-policy agenda of a future George W. Bush administration. Hadley was one of a group of senior campaign policy advisers to then-Texas Governor Bush known collectively as "the Vulcans." The group, in addition to Hadley, included Rice, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle and had been assembled by George Shultz and Dick Cheney beginning in late 1998, when Bush first launched his presidential bid.

Hadley's briefing shocked a number of the participants, according to Clifford Kiracofe, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute, who spoke to several of them shortly after the meeting. Hadley announced that the "number-one foreign-policy agenda" of a Bush administration would be Iraq and the unfinished business of removing Saddam Hussein from power. Hadley also made it clear that the Israel-Palestine conflict, which had dominated the Middle East agenda of the Clinton administration, would be placed in the deep freeze.

I guess no one is much surprised that dubya came into office with a hard-on for war with Iraq, but what absolutely astonishes me is the fact that this article was published in August of 2004. That would have been right in the middle of the presidential campaigns and yet the evidence that Lang presents was never discussed and the preznit was never questioned about it. I guess questions like that would be insufficiently supportive of the troops. Rackum frackum, liberal media my ass...