O'Neill claims national security insight into Bush's pre-9-11 plans to topple Saddam.

Jan. 10, 2004: PoliSat .Com's Political Satire/ Commentary Daily Update # 01·· ™©·2004··
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O'Neill claims national security insight into Bush's pre-9-11 plans to topple Saddam.

Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, forced by Bush to resign in December, 2002, now says that before 9-11, Bush ordered plans for ousting Saddam. O'Neill made this statement and others critical of Bush in an interview previously taped for broadcast tomorrow by CBS on 60 Minutes. He had previously expressed similar criticisms to "journalist Ron Suskind" for inclusion in Suskind's forthcoming book, The Price of Loyalty, which Suskind says he based on interviews of O'Neill and other administration officials and also on documents O'Neill furnished to him. News reports attributed O'Neill's forced resignation to his opposition to the final round of tax cuts.

O'Neill alleges that Bush embraced the final round of tax-cut legislation despite having previously asked, "Haven't we already given money to rich people ... Shouldn't we be giving money to the middle?" CBS says the book quotes O'Neill as having said Bush was so disengaged in cabinet meetings that he "was like a blind man in a roomful of deaf people." According to CBS, 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."

Before resigning, O'Neill had become well-known for controversial statements such as comments that worsened a financial crisis in Brazil. One of the most memorable events involved a Senate-hearing dispute between O'Neill and Senator Robert Byrd over who endured the worst poverty in their respective childhoods. O'Neill seems to be a decent sort of fellow, but one wonders the extent to which the mode of his resignation adversely influences the objectivity of his retrospection.

In last-cent'ry's year 98
both Congress and Clinton embraced
enactments proposing
the goal of deposing
Saddam before waiting too late.

The fear was that sanctions would soon
be ended and then he'd resume
his weapons construction
for massive destruction
so neighbors would dance to his tunes.

However, from year 98
'til 2000's end we did wait
as though to propose
Saddam be deposed
too soon would be worse than too late.

Since planning remained to be done
beginning in 2001,
it shouldn't surprise
that plans were devised
a long time before Nine-One-One.

Before Nine-Eleven we thought
containing Saddam could be wrought
by mass-redeployment
of means for enforcement
of sanctions, whose ending he'd sought.

Deployments of means to contain
Saddam could incentivize change
replacing Hussein
in bargains to gain
reductions in sanctions maintained.

But Nine-One-One's terror revealed
such mass-redeployment would yield
a greater incentive
for terror intended
to drive us from Arabic fields.

Thereafter, a mass-redeployment
as means for containment enforcement
Saddam would desire
for stoking the fires
for more Nine-One-One type deployments.

Ostensibly, O'Neill's work at Alcoa didn't prepare him for evaluating discussions of contingency plans as apart of the national policy set in 1998 to seek to force a change of the regime in Iraq. Jim Wrenn, Editor@PoliSat.Com.

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