LET'S LET BYGONES BE BYGONES?:

TODAY: YOU'VE GOTTA READ IT (Kathryn Jean Lopez, 1/13/04, The Corner)

COURIC: So you see nothing wrong with that being at the top of the president's agenda 10 days after the inauguration?

O'NEILL: Absolutely not. One of the candidates had said this confirms his worst suspicions. I'm amazed that anyone would think that our government, on a continuing basis across political administrations, doesn't do contingency planning and look at circumstances. Saddam Hussein has been this forever. And so, I was surprised, as I've said in the book, that Iraq was given such a high priority. But I was not surprised that we were doing a continuation of planning that had been going on and looking at contingency options during the Clinton administration.

COURIC: Because of the Iraq Liberation Act that was passed in 1998 almost unanimously by the Senate and near unanimously by the House.

O'NEILL: Absolutely.

COURIC: Ron?

SUSKIND: I mean, to be sure, you know, Paul and other people in the room in that first NSC meeting were surprised, as Paul says in the book, that Iraq was at the top of the agenda and that it was more about the hows than the whys: how to affect regime change, rather than whether we should engage possibly the U.S. military in doing that. That's what the book says. When people read the book, they'll see it. You know, is that important? It's crucial for public dialogue. But it's the kind of thing that unless people read the book, they can draw assessments that may not be in the book.

COURIC: At the same time though, Mr. O'Neill, you do talk about the fact that you were in National Security Council meetings for 23 months, you saw a variety of documents and nowhere did you ever see evidence...

O'NEILL: I think I saw everything unless something was withheld from me that I didn't know about.

COURIC: Well, we'll get to that in a moment. But you say nowhere did you ever see evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. Well, an intelligent person would draw the conclusion that those charges were being trumped up by the administration as a rationale for the invasion.

O'NEILL: No, that's not what I've said. I have a very high standard for what represents evidence. If you told me that you put your hands on weapons of mass destruction, I'd probably believe you because you are a public person. If someone that I believed in told me they'd actually seen it, that's evidence for me. But it's possible -- and certainly there were lots of inferences and circumstantial things that the national security assessments pulled together in looking at this question of mass destruction. I'm not denying or gainsaying the fact that one could make a case. What I have said is I never saw anything that I considered to be concrete evidence of weapons of mass destruction. I think the fact that we haven't found them makes the point. That also doesn't make a point that we shouldn't have gotten rid of Saddam Hussein. I'm not making that case. I'm making the really clear case that I know the difference between evidence and what is allusion and assertion and the rest. That's my point.

COURIC: Well, do you think an invasion of a country should be based on allusion and assertion?

O'NEILL: Well, I think one has to look very hard at the apparatus we have with the national intelligence assessments. And it's why we have presidents. At the end of the day there's one person who gets to decide is what he considers to be convincing proof of basis for going to war, and we elected George Bush and he decided it was good enough.

Okay, we're willing to accept that Mr. O'Neill may have been, but can anyone else have been surprised that the new President accepted the policy of regime change directed at the dictator who tried to have his father assassinated on a trip where Laura Bush was accompanying him (if memory serves)? Was there really someone expecting a moderation in policy?

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 13, 2004 03:52 PM