Saddam's
Ouster Planned Before 9/11
By
CBS News
11 January, 2003
The Bush Administration began laying plans
for an invasion of Iraq, including the use of American troops, within
days of President Bush's inauguration in January of 2001 -- not eight
months later after the 9/11 attacks as has been previously reported.
That's what former
Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill says in his first interview about his
time as a White House insider. O'Neill talks to Correspondent Lesley
Stahl in the interview, to be broadcast on 60 Minutes, Sunday, Jan.
11 at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
"From the very
beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person
and that he needed to go," he tells Stahl. "For me, the notion
of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral right to do whatever
we decide to do is a really huge leap."
O'Neill, fired by
the White House for his disagreement on tax cuts, is the main source
for an upcoming book, "The Price of Loyalty," authored by
Ron Suskind.
Suskind says O'Neill
and other White House insiders he interviewed gave him documents that
show that in the first three months of 2001, the administration was
looking at military options for removing Saddam Hussein from power and
planning for the aftermath of Saddam's downfall -- including post-war
contingencies like peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals and the
future of Iraq's oil.
"There are
memos," Suskind tells Stahl, "One of them marked 'secret'
says 'Plan for Post-Saddam Iraq.'"
A Pentagon document,
says Suskind, titled "Foreign Suitors For Iraqi Oilfield Contracts,"
outlines areas of oil exploration. "It talks about contractors
around the world from...30, 40 countries and which ones have what intentions
on oil in Iraq," Suskind says.
According to CBS News Reporter Lisa Barron in Baghdad, "The Iraqi
National Congress, an umbrella group of former exiles, says it's not
surprised by O'Neill's remarks. Spokesman Entifadh Qanbar tells CBS
News that the Bush administration opened official channels to the Iraqi
opposition soon after coming to power, and discussed how to remove Saddam.
The group opened an office in Washington shotly afterwards."
In the book, O'Neill
is quoted as saying he was surprised that no one in a National Security
Council meeting questioned why Iraq should be invaded. "It was
all about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president
saying 'Go find me a way to do this,'" says O'Neill in the book.
Suskind also writes
about a White House meeting in which he says the president seems to
be wavering about going forward with his second round of tax cuts. "Haven't
we already given money to rich people ... Shouldn't we be giving money
to the middle," Suskind says the president uttered, according to
a nearly verbatim transcript of an Economic Team meeting he says he
obtained from someone at the meeting.
O'Neill, who was
asked to resign because of his opposition to the tax cut, says he doesn't
think his tell-all account in this book will be attacked by his former
employers as sour grapes. "I will be really disappointed if [the
White House] reacts that way," he tells Stahl. "I can't imagine
that I am going to be attacked for telling the truth."
O'Neill also is
quoted saying in the book that President Bush was so disengaged in cabinet
meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people."
O'Neill is also
quoted in the book as saying the administration's decision-making process
was so flawed that often top officials had no real sense of what the
president wanted them to do, forcing them to act on "little more
than hunches about what the president might think."
"It's revealing,"
said Stahl on The Early Show Friday. "I would say it's an unflattering
portrait of the White House and of the president -- and specifically,
about how they make decisions."
A lack of dialogue,
according to O'Neill, was the norm in cabinet meetings he attended.
And it was similar in one-on-one meetings, says O'Neill. Of his first
such meeting with the president, O'Neill says, "I went in with
a long list of things to talk about and, I thought, to engage [him]
on...I was surprised it turned out me talking and the president just
listening...It was mostly a monologue."
On Friday, a White
House official tried to brush off O'Neill's assessment of President
Bush's decision-making policies. "It's well known the way the president
approaches governing and setting priorities," says Spokeman Scott
McClellan. "The president is someone that leads and acts decisively
on our biggest priorities, and that is exactly what he'll continue to
do."
CBS News Correspondent
Mark Knoller reported Saturday that, as the White House sees it, O'Neill's
remarks are those of a disgruntled former official, and it should not
have come as a surprise to O'Neill that the U.S. advocated Saddam's
ouster.
In fact, a senior
administration official tells CBS News it would have been irresponsible
not to plan for Saddam's eventual removal.
As for the charge
that there were early plans to invade Iraq, Knoller says the official
calls that "laughable." Suggesting that O'Neill doesn't know
what he's talking about on this matter, the official told CBS News O'Neill
had enough problems in his own area of expertise.
Another senior administraiton
official told CBS News Saturday, "No one ever listened to the crazy
things he said before, why should we start now?"
Separately, McClellan
added Saturday, "We appreciate his service. While we're not in
the business of book reviews, it appears the world according to Mr O'Nneill
is more about justifying his own opinions than looking at the reality
of the results we're achieving on behalf on the American people.
"The president
is going to continue to be forward-looking and focus on building on
the results we've achieved on the economy and efforts to make the world
safer and a better place."
A year ago, Paul
O'Neill was fired from his job as George Bush's Treasury Secretary for
disagreeing too many times with the president's policy on tax cuts.
Now, O'Neill - who
is known for speaking his mind - talks for the first time about his
two years inside the Bush administration. His story is the centerpiece
of a new book being published this week about the way the Bush White
House is run.
Entitled "The
Price of Loyalty," the book by a former Wall Street Journal reporter
draws on interviews with high-level officials who gave the author their
personal accounts of meetings with the president, their notes and documents.
But the main source
of the book was Paul O'Neill. Correspondent Lesley Stahl reports.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Paul O'Neill says he is going public because he thinks the Bush Administration
has been too secretive about how decisions have been made.
Will this be seen as a kiss-and-tell" book?
I've come
to believe that people will say damn near anything, so I'm sure somebody
will say all of that and more, says ONeill, who was George
Bush's top economic policy official.
In the book, ONeill
says that the president did not make decisions in a methodical way:
there was no free-flow of ideas or open debate.
At cabinet meetings,
he says the president was "like a blind man in a roomful of deaf
people. There is no discernible connection," forcing top officials
to act "on little more than hunches about what the president might
think."
This is what O'Neill
says happened at his first hour-long, one-on-one meeting with Mr. Bush:
I went in with a long list of things to talk about, and I thought
to engage on and as the book says, I was surprised that it turned out
me talking, and the president just listening
As I recall, it
was mostly a monologue.
He also says that
President Bush was disengaged, at least on domestic issues, and that
disturbed him. And he says that wasn't his experience when he worked
as a top official under Presidents Nixon and Ford, or the way he ran
things when he was chairman of Alcoa.
O'Neill readily
agreed to tell his story to the book's author Ron Suskind and
he adds that he's taking no money for his part in the book.
Suskind says he
interviewed hundreds of people for the book including several
cabinet members.
O'Neill is the only
one who spoke on the record, but Suskind says that someone high up in
the administration Donald Rumsfeld -- warned ONeill not
to do this book.
Was it a warning,
or a threat?
I don't think
so. I think it was the White House concerned, says Suskind. Understandably,
because O'Neill has spent extraordinary amounts of time with the president.
They said, This could really be the one moment where things are
revealed."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Not only did O'Neill give Suskind his time, he gave him 19,000 internal
documents.
Everything's there: Memoranda to the President, handwritten "thank
you" notes, 100-page documents. Stuff that's sensitive, says
Suskind, adding that in some cases, it included transcripts of private,
high-level National Security Council meetings. You dont
get higher than that.
And what happened
at President Bush's very first National Security Council meeting is
one of O'Neill's most startling revelations.
From the very
beginning, there was a conviction, that Saddam Hussein was a bad person
and that he needed to go, says ONeill, who adds that going
after Saddam was topic "A" 10 days after the inauguration
- eight months before Sept. 11.
From the very
first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change
this regime, says Suskind. Day one, these things were laid
and sealed.
As treasury secretary,
O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He
says in the book he was surprised at the meeting that questions such
as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.
"It was all
about finding a way to do it. That was the tone of it. The president
saying Go find me a way to do this," says ONeill.
For me, the notion of pre-emption, that the U.S. has the unilateral
right to do whatever we decide to do, is a really huge leap.
And that came up
at this first meeting, says ONeill, who adds that the discussion
of Iraq continued at the next National Security Council meeting two
days later.
He got briefing
materials under this cover sheet. There are memos. One of them
marked, secret, says, Plan for post-Saddam Iraq," adds
Suskind, who says that they discussed an occupation of Iraq in January
and February of 2001.
Based on his interviews
with O'Neill and several other officials at the meetings, Suskind writes
that the planning envisioned peacekeeping troops, war crimes tribunals,
and even divvying up Iraq's oil wealth.
He obtained one
Pentagon document, dated March 5, 2001, and entitled "Foreign Suitors
for Iraqi Oilfield contracts," which includes a map of potential
areas for exploration.
It talks about
contractors around the world from, you know, 30-40 countries. And which
ones have what intentions, says Suskind. On oil in Iraq.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
During the campaign, candidate Bush had criticized the Clinton-Gore
Administration for being too interventionist: "If we don't stop
extending our troops all around the world in nation-building missions,
then we're going to have a serious problem coming down the road. And
I'm going to prevent that."
The thing that's most surprising, I think, is how emphatically,
from the very first, the administration had said X during
the campaign, but from the first day was often doing Y,
says Suskind. Not just saying Y, but actively moving
toward the opposite of what they had said during the election.
The president had
promised to cut taxes, and he did. Within six months of taking office,
he pushed a trillion dollars worth of tax cuts through Congress.
But O'Neill thought
it should have been the end. After 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan,
the budget deficit was growing. So at a meeting with the vice president
after the mid-term elections in 2002, Suskind writes that O'Neill argued
against a second round of tax cuts.
Cheney, at
this moment, shows his hand, says Suskind. He says, You
know, Paul, Reagan proved that deficits don't matter. We won the mid-term
elections, this is our due.
O'Neill is speechless.
It was not
just about not wanting the tax cut. It was about how to use the nation's
resources to improve the condition of our society, says ONeill.
And I thought the weight of working on Social Security and fundamental
tax reform was a lot more important than a tax reduction.
Did he think it
was irresponsible? Well, it's for sure not what I would have done,
says ONeill.
The former treasury
secretary accuses Vice President Dick Cheney of not being an honest
broker, but, with a handful of others, part of "a praetorian guard
that encircled the president" to block out contrary views. "This
is the way Dick likes it," says ONeill.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Meanwhile, the White House was losing patience with O'Neill. He was
becoming known for a series of off-the-cuff remarks his critics called
gaffes. One of them sent the dollar into a nosedive and required major
damage control.
Twice during stock market meltdowns, O'Neill was not available to the
president: He was out of the country - one time on a trip to Africa
with the Irish rock star Bono.
Africa made
an enormous splash. It was like a road show, says Suskind. He
comes back and the president says to him at a meeting, You know,
you're getting quite a cult following. And it clearly was not
a joke. And it was not said in jest.
Suskind writes that
the relationship grew tenser and that the president even took a jab
at O'Neill in public, at an economic forum in Texas.
The two men were
never close. And O'Neill was not amused when Mr. Bush began calling
him "The Big O." He thought the president's habit of giving
people nicknames was a form of bullying. Everything came to a head for
O'Neill at a November 2002 meeting at the White House of the economic
team.
It's a huge
meeting. You got Dick Cheney from the, you know, secure location on
the video. The President is there, says Suskind, who was given
a nearly verbatim transcript by someone who attended the meeting.
He says everyone
expected Mr. Bush to rubber stamp the plan under discussion: a big new
tax cut. But, according to Suskind, the president was perhaps having
second thoughts about cutting taxes again, and was uncharacteristically
engaged.
He asks, Haven't
we already given money to rich people? This second tax cut's gonna do
it again, says Suskind.
He says, Didnt
we already, why are we doing it again? Now, his advisers,
they say, Well Mr. President, the upper class, they're the entrepreneurs.
That's the standard response. And the president kind of goes,
OK. That's their response. And then, he comes back to it
again. Well, shouldn't we be giving money to the middle, won't
people be able to say, You did it once, and then you did it twice,
and what was it good for?"
But according to
the transcript, White House political advisor Karl Rove jumped in.
Karl Rove
is saying to the president, a kind of mantra. Stick to principle.
Stick to principle. He says it over and over again, says
Suskind. Dont waver.
In the end, the
president didn't. And nine days after that meeting in which O'Neill
made it clear he could not publicly support another tax cut, the vice
president called and asked him to resign.
With the deficit
now climbing towards $400 billion, O'Neill maintains he was in the right.
But look at the
economy today.
Yes, well,
in the last quarter the growth rate was 8.2 percent. It was terrific,
says ONeill. I think the tax cut made a difference. But
without the tax cut, we would have had 6 percent real growth, and the
prospect of dealing with transformation of Social Security and fundamentally
fixing the tax system. And to me, those were compelling competitors
for, against more tax cuts.
While in the book
O'Neill comes off as constantly appalled at Mr. Bush, he was surprised
when Stahl told him she found his portrait of the president unflattering.
Hmmm, you
really think so, asks ONeill, who says he isnt joking.
Well, Ill be darned.
You're giving
me the impression that you're just going to be stunned if they attack
you for this book, says Stahl to ONeill. And they're
going to say, I predict, you know, it's sour grapes. He's getting back
because he was fired.
I will be
really disappointed if they react that way because I think they'll be
hard put to, says ONeill.
Is he prepared for
it?
Well, I don't
think I need to be because I can't imagine that I'm going to be attacked
for telling the truth, says ONeill. Why would I be
attacked for telling the truth?
White House spokesman
Scott McClellan was asked about the book on Friday and said "The
president is someone that leads and acts decisively on our biggest priorities
and that is exactly what he'll continue to do."
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